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Old Zorin Forum archive → Help and Support

USB External HDD help.

glsmaxx

Sat May 03, 2014 5:41:27 pm

I am looking for a help installing to a USB hard drive. I have no problem with dual booting or installing to a thumb drive but I keep getting boot error messages when trying to install to an external hard drive. I don't understand the BIOS Boot partition and every time I install to the hard drive and boot from it I get the error that it can't be booted. No bootable device.

Any help would be apreciated.

Wolfman

Sat May 03, 2014 8:17:02 pm

Hi,

where did you place the bootloader?, if you put it on the external drive, it may not read it, the bootloader should be on the 1st HDD /dev/sda!.

See "Booting the Computer from USB" here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Insta ... r_from_USB

Anonymous

Sun May 04, 2014 12:50:29 pm

Hi

The bootloader can be located also on the "USB device" /dev/sdb or /dev/sdc (what ever it is), however then you have to select the USB as boot device from the BIOS' boot order list, othervice it will boot by default to HDD (Windows or some bootloader what you there have) ?

Do not select to install the bootloader to any /dev/sdb1 or /dev/sdc1 partition, then it will not detect the bootloader from that partition 1 and you get that error message. (That is just something that happend to me when I made that mistake).

It is safe to have the bootloader in the USB if you are planning to make some changes in to your HDD installations, so that wont mix up your USB bootloader, it will start from BIOS any case. That is why I installed it there.