Partitioning your external hard drive and installing an operating system on it, was quite fascinating at the very first thought. I backed up my data on my friends laptop, and started to dwell into the night…I knew it was going to be a long night. It was yesterday, and the weekend had just begun.

Okie, I am not here to tell you a story. Lets get started…

Pre-installation
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1) Download Ubuntu 8.10 latest release here
2) Use any CD writing tool to create the bootable Ubuntu CD by using the downloaded ISO.
3) Change the boot sequence of your computer to USB as the first boot device. Yes, we need a bios which allows you to boot from a USB device…wasn’t that too obvious?
Select the second boot device as CD/DVD ROM. Please do not connect the drive yet, or when you boot it might say, no boot loader found.

Installation
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Turn on the computer, and insert the Ubuntu CD we created.

From here on I am going to give you the exact notes I typed while I was performing the installation. This would also tell you a few things about the problems that you might face.

Computer started by booting from the CD, it gave me various options:
-Install
-Check memory
-Check Cd for errors
-Advanced options, etc

Unfortunately, I clicked the Check memory option and lost 40-50 minutes on it. It kept on scanning my RAM with various different bits to make sure, it was working properly. I am glad though it was working with no errors. Connect your external hard drive. This can be done until, you get to the partition manager screen and after the system has already started booting from CD.

Choose the install Ubuntu option.

On the next few screens following things appear:
1) Language selection
2) Time Zone (A nice zooming map appears)
3) Key Board regional settings
4) Partion manager – This detects all the HDD attached to your system and names them. It also provides the brand name for easy identification.

– Guided – resize and use free space (You can select which hard disk)
– Guided – use entire disk
– sda internal HDD
– sdb for me it was the external HDD
– Manual

Once you select any of the options, it shows a nice graphical before and after representation of your disks. It enables easier understanding.
I used the first option and resized(use mouse to drag the vertical bar) my external HDD to use 20GB of the for Ubuntu, rest would be left as free space.

Click forward and it will give you a warning of any previous changes needs to be undone. This is an irreversible process.
Please make sure the right HDD is selected, to avoid formatting the wrong drive.

5) After the partitioning is complete, it asks you – Who are you?
Your name –
User name – must start with a small letter
Password –
Computer name –
checkbox for login automatically

Pretty easy to answer the question of Who are you? Isn’t it? 🙂

6) Migrate document and settings from the windows accounts.
It will show you different accounts that you may have on your windows system. Personally, I did not feel like doing anything so left it unchecked.

7) Ready to Install
It gives you a summary of whatever you entered on the previous screens.

It also tells you about which partitions are going to be formatted:
In my case, it was partition #5 of SCSI6 (0,0,0) (sdb) as ext3
partition #6 of SCSI6 (0,0,0) (sdb) as swap

There is an Advanced button, which shows whether to install the boot loader and the device for boot loader installation.
Make sure you properly select the boot loader.
By default it selects hd0 – which I am not sure which partition is that.
The other options were to install it on SDA – which is my internal drive.
I have read on certain posts that I should not install the boot loader on my internal drive. Also, I would not like my laptop to know, there exists another operating system on it. Easy for those, who are in the warranty phase of their laptop and do not want to screw the recovery drives, etc.

The other options were sdb, sdb1, sdb5
With my little knowledge about linux I know that it creates three partitions.
a) Boot loader
b) EXT3 – for actual storage and installation
c) Swap partition

From the previous screen, it was clear that sdb partition #6 was for swap and sdb5 was for ext3
sdb should be the left out free space so I selected sdb1 which it should create as a boot partition.
This I am just hunching… Hope it turns out to be good…

There is a checkbox for popularity contest – by default unchecked
Network proxy – in case you have any.

Now all the steps 7/7 are done… and it starts to install the system.
It is going thru partitioning…and scanning files…copying files…

8) Done with copying files… hardware detection… installing
profiles… removing unncessary files/packages.
Installing GRUB..and then asks for restart. Clicking restart removed the CD-ROM and started the system. I was glad that Ubuntu started on my first attempt itself… I get a little nervous, when things which I think are complicated turns out to be easy at the first attempt… I started looking for the paritions on the hard drive, soon to realize that using sdb1 was not a good option. It took all the drives free space, and made it a boot partition, thus making it inaccessible to Windows OS. See my nervousness is not really fake… and what a fallacy – a boot partition of 445GB with a OS partition of 20GB 🙂

Now I decided to use sda5, as that would make my actual OS partition bootable. which I guess should be fair…I am not sure, if we can make ext3 partition as bootable though.
One more thing to note was, if you use a completely unallocated disk, you dont get the guided option of using a portion of the free space. It allocates complete hard drive for Ubuntu.

After performing all the above steps again, I Landed into another problem. Since, by selecting sdb5 I made the boot partition inside the extended partition, for some wierd reason my laptop didnt boot and was just kept halting with a blinking curson on a notorious black screen. Yikes… am I gonna do the installation again… Its 5:30 in the morning… Linux does screw amateurs like me.. 🙁

Very well, lets do it the last time and select sdb …you would ask why? Because, I saw it as unallocated space in the computer management window (used the admin tools of Windows to see the partition information). So you can surely allocate some space out there…for the MBR.

It boots using USB as well as the free partition is visible to Windows for backup…
Now you can change the boot sequence of your machine to
a) USB ,
b) Internal HDD,
c) CD/DVD ROM
By doing this, whenever you want to boot with linux just connect your USB drive and boot, else window boots automatically.
Its 6:30 in the morning, and I am finally done 🙂 – Happy Weekend… Cheers!