[LBo] Setup grub to boot off external harddisk

[Randy Kramer]

On Monday 27 August 2007 06:51 am, Anita Lewis wrote:
> On 08/23/2007 11:57 AM David Roseman wrote:
> > What I want to do is to utilise both internal disks as linux, and an
> > external with windows on it.  How would I go about setting up grub to do
> > this without causing any of my operating systems to stop booting ?

> If you can't get Windows to boot on the external, then you may want to
> rethink or do more research on it.

Dave,

Let us know how you make out--it could be handy to keep a Windows installation 
on an external disk so that Windows could be run quickly and easily on some 
rare occasion when I needed it, yet not take up space on my normal (internal) 
hard drives.

I presume your external hard drive has a USB interface?

From my recollections / past experiences with installing Windows (nothing 
since Win2000), I think that:  (But those memories and experiences are pretty 
fuzzy at this point in time--it's a bear getting old.)

   * Windows can be booted from any primary partition of a disk as long as the 
primary partitions before the Windows partition are "readable" by Windows.  
(I.e., if you had a Linux primary partition before the Windows bootable 
partition, you had problems--I'm not 100% sure of this, but I'm 99% sure of 
the next bullet.)

   * Similarly, if you had a Linux partition before any Windows partition, the 
Windows partitions after the Linux partition could not be found (read) by 
Windows (after Windows was booted).  Thus, if you wanted a (Windows) D: 
partition for data, it had to be installed before any Linux partitions on its 
disk.

But, I don't recall any reason that the Windows bootable partition had to be 
on hda instead of hdb, hdc, hdd, or an external hard drive.  (I can't recall 
whether I ever tried that, though.)

Randy Kramer