Please bear with me on this newbie question, my install experience is quite limited. Is it possible to install to usb external disk when bios does not see usb? In an older thread Feb 21, 2009 Re: kubuntu vs fedora initrd init files, Mikkel responded: > I have done it both ways - as a fresh install, and by taking a hard > drive with an installed OS, and putting it in an external USB case, > and the drive has always ended up as /dev/sda. This is much less of > a problem if you are using LVM and/of partition labels then if you > are mounting partitions directly. (As long as your LVM names do not > collide! ie more then one VolGroup00.) > By far, the easiest is to do a fresh, expert install to a USB drive > - it will even do the proper Grub install so that you can boot off > the USB drive directly on any system that supports booting from a > USB drive. You can do this when moving an install to an external > case, but it is much easier doing it at install time. > Mikkel --is this advice re "fresh, expert install" relevant in my case where it appears that bios does not recognize my usb external disk? --if so, is that because the install cd/dvd will see the usb? ie despite the bios problem? --are you saying that it will do a "proper Grub install" to the usb MBR? your point being that then the usb disk could be booted off of another system whose bios does both recognize and support booting from USB drive? --with my current box where the bios doesnt see the USB, the "proper Grub install" to the usb MBR won't be seen?, ie wont interfere with booting my older installs (fc5,...) from the MBR on my sda scsi disk? I do have that sda mbr backed up: [root@bootp ~]# ls -l mbrbackup -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 512 Mar 14 14:13 mbrbackup [root@bootp ~]# thanks for any help Jack