Hello, i have just started using linux for school and at school i installed Fedora Core 4 onto a external hard drive on a dell computer. I really need to be able to run this linux program that is already installed on the external harddrive on my home computer. I need a clear and precise way to be able to load this up. i dont know any of the techno jargon. I have tried booting the computer via usb, that doesnt work and ive been trying to figure about these boot disks because i think that is what i need. But i dont know how any of that stuff works. This may sound incredibly basic but i just dont know. This is urgent i have stuff i need to do on this for school by monday. Ill be sitting on the computer until i get a reply so i will probably ask you a question straight back. Thanks you for any help
A lot of Linux Distro's refuse to run off an external HD. However, i'm pretty sure there are ways of doing it, so first things first. When you installed it, did it ask you if you wanted to install a bootmanager?
OK stupid me, i had usb ports disabled for dos mode. That took care of that problem now in the loading process it comes up with INIT: cannot execute "/sbin/mingetty" INIT: Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes and it has about 30 lines of this then every 5 minutes its tries again and the same stuff comes up. And no it did not ask if i wanted to install a boot manager when installing it although on my class notes it says if you want to use the USBII hdd elsewhere then create boot floppy. I didnt do this but im sure that there is someother way of getting into it, and reinstalling it isnt an option. THANKS
You'll probably have to reinstall, so that means yer in a serious heap of trouble then... Making that bootfloppy was necessary if the install was done from a different computer then yours, so reinstalling probably is your only option. However, since i'm by no means an expert at Fedora, you might want to try their offical forums or IRC chat to see if they can help you out, cause this is gonna be complicated, and since you already said you're not to at home with any technical details, having an expert help you out might be wiser.
a simpler way might be to open up the PC and hook in the hard drive out of the external enclosure or whatever it is, into the PC (i presume your home PC is also Fedora ie not Windows). then just mount the relevant partition off the second hard drive. i did this a couple days ago as i'd built a new Mandriva Linux box and wanted a few GB of stuff off the hard drive out of the old Mandriva box. i basically just did something like this - (as this is a small-form-factore pc ie with room for just a cd-rom drive and a hard drive, with 2 ribbon cables that only have connectors for one device each, i just removed the cd-rom drive and connected the second hard drive to that ribbon cable, thus the second hard drive is 'hdc') mkdir /mnt/old-drive mount -t auto /dev/hdc8 /mnt/old-drive # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda5 479M 94M 361M 21% / /dev/hda8 24G 8.6G 16G 36% /home /dev/hda6 5.8G 2.2G 3.4G 40% /usr /dev/hda7 5.8G 292M 5.2G 6% /var [bold]/dev/hdc8 14G 9.2G 4.3G 69% /mnt/old-drive[/bold] ('hda' is my primary hard drive, 'hdc' here was the secondary disc). ps these are what the hda, hdc etc stand for - hda is master device on primary channel hdb is slave device on primary channel hdc is master device on secondary channel hdd is slave device on secondary channel
