external installation question

Fri May 30 18:52:40 UTC 2014

Hello John and all,
Sorry about the confusion.  Yes, I should have said "fix the boot order in the bios."  I had a previous thread where I asked specific questions to that topic.

Also, thanks for the comments on the mount/unmount issue, I was about to get confused, but your other post cleared things up for me.  

I just have a couple of more details to finish ironing out with the install process and I can give this project a try.

I haven't been following this discussion very closely but depending on 
what you mean by fixing the boot order, you are correct about the way it 
will work. By "fixing the boot order", you mean in the BIOS, right? 
There will be something in the BIOS to allow you to boot from a USB 
device. It doesn't care if it's a flash drive or an external hard drive. 
You need to put that ahead of booting from the internal hard drive and 
then it should boot from your external disk when it's plugged in and 
from the internal hard disk when it is not. In fact, you should be able 
to boot from the internal disk even when the external disk is plugged in 
but that would require you to hit a key at exactly the right point in 
time. Actually, that's not that difficult to do if you have some vision 
or if you have a light probe. I do it practically every day on my job.

Plus, you may not have to fix the boot order. If you have already tried 
booting from a thumb drive with linux on it, and it didn't work, then 
you will have to fix the BIOS boot order. But many, maybe most, PCs come 
with the BIOS already configured to boot from a USB device. It might be 
worth just giving it a try.

There is another possible meaning to the phrase "fixing the boot order". 
You can set that in the boot loader program (usually grub on linux 
machines). Your external drive will probably use grub and there will be 
a point where you could pick either linux or Windows even after the BIOS 
has selected the external hard drive as the boot device.

It's important to understand the boot process. The BIOS selectes a boot 
loader and the boot loader loads the operating system. So first the BIOS 
finds the boot loader on your external hard drive. Then the boot loader, 
probably grub, loads linux. But grub could also load Windows from your 
internal hard disk.

On 05/30/14 07:46, aerospace1028 at hotmail.com wrote:
> Hello list,
> First off, thank you to Kyle and Paul for your feedback.
>
> That was a good reminder about external-drive failure. I still think
> the trade-offs suit my needs at the moment.
>
> If I understand correctly--once I get everything loaded on the external
> drive and the boot order fixed--with the drive attached to my computer,
> I will have the option to boot into archlinux, and with the drive
> disconnected--while the machine is powered off--booting the machine will
> revert to automatically jumping into the factory-installed Windows-7.
> The net effect should be similar to when I boot the live-CD: without the
> cd in the tray (or this case the external drive plugged into the
> computer), my computer will have no clue there are any other operating
> systems in existance and just go happily on its way? or as happily as
> my machine gets? :-)
>
> Thank you.
>
>
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-- 
---
John G. Heim, 608-263-4189, jheim at math.wisc.edu

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