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The Linux Newbie's walkthrough to Install Fedora 7 to a USB drive.
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  1. #1
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    The Linux Newbie's walkthrough to Install Fedora 7 to a USB drive.

    Hello I'm fairly new to Linux and about a week ago I posted a question about installing Fedora 7 to a USB drive. I eventually got it figured out. Since then I've gotten several PMs asking for clarification about things or how I did it so I figured I'd post my step by step walk through here to hopefully help out some other Linux Newbies. If there are any points that any experienced Linux users think I should change or add please respond and I'll be happy to edit this accordingly. Hope this will be of some help to somebody.




    First off let me describe what I wanted to do. I wanted to create a dual boot system without removing my Windows XP installation. I had a 200GB external USB drive with no data on it that I needed to save. I wanted to select which OS was booted on startup by selecting which device to boot from in the BIOS one time boot menu (Internal HD for Windows and USB storage device for Fedora). I know there are ways of doing this without selecting this is BIOS and instead let the GRUB boot loader prompt the user for which OS to boot but I was not familiar with that method at all. I was also worried that if I did something wrong I would damage the MBR on my Internal HD and corrupt my Windows OS. (if any Linux Gurus want to write up a step by step method for using GRUB I'll be happy to add it here as well)

    If you want to attempt this be sure to check to make sure your BIOS supports USB booting, most current systems do but some older ones don't. If yours doesn't, then this method will not work for you!!!!







    Here is my walk through to set up Fedora 7 for the Linux Newbie like I described above:

    First and for most since I you are fairly new to Linux I would suggest that you turn off your computer and disconnect any other external drives you have attached to your system.
    Now I would also recommend that you disconnect any internal drives as well. This will ensure that you don't do anything that can mess up your Windows installation.


    Now after all hard drives except the external you want to use are disconnected, insert the installation DVD and boot your system from the CD/DVD drive.

    A bunch of text will start scrolling over the screen, wait until a box appears with 4 options in it, select the first one which is "Install or Upgrade an Installation".

    More text will scroll across the screen and eventually a Blue Screen will pop up and ask you if you would like to test your CD. I recommend that you test the DVD but if you had a DVD shipped to you or you've already run an installation with this disk and you know its good you can skip the test and proceed.

    Now a GUI will start to load and the Fedora logo will appear on the screen. Click the Next Button.

    On the next screen select which language to use for the install and click next

    Now select your keyboard layout and select next

    Now you will see a screen that comes up with a large box in the center of the screen above that box there is a drop down menu box. In the drop down menu select "Create Custom Layout" most of the screen will then be grayed out. Click "Next"

    Now on the next screen you will see a list of all of the Hard Drives attached to your system (which should only be the external since everything else is disconnected). Now on the top half of the screen you will probably see something like sda1 (thats the first partition on the sda drive) Delete each partition on that drive by selecting it and clicking the delete button in the center of the screen. Warning: this will delete all data currently on that external drive

    Now select the free space on sda and click the New button. A pop up box will appear the first drop down box on the screen will ask you for a Mount Point, select "/" Below that box is another box that asks for the File System Type, select "ext3". Now you will see a text field that will ask you for the size of the drive in MB. This will be your main Fedora Partition where you will install programs and store most of your data I'd recommend making this partition at least 10000MB (10GB). Since I was working with a large 200GB drive I created this partition to be 60000MB (60GB). After you've picked a size go ahead and finish this screen.

    Now you will be taken back to the screen you were on previously, select the "Free" space on the sda drive and click new again. This will bring up the same pop-up window. Now this time in the "File System Type" drop down box select "swap".

    A swap partition is very similar to Virtual Memory in Windows. When your system's RAM is full it stores data that would normally be stored in RAM here. This lets your system run more applications at once but reading and writing to the swap partition is not nearly as fast a reading and writing to RAM. Every time the CPU tries to access a piece of data that isn't in the RAM it has to search the swap partition for that data so the larger the swap partition the longer it takes to search. So if you don't have enough space on your swap partition you may not be able to run a lot of applications simultaneously but if its too large it will take too long to find the data that is needed. From what I read, the basic rule of thumb is to make the swap partition twice the size of your RAM (example: for 256MB of RAM you should use a 512MB swap file)

    Go ahead and create a swap partition to twice the size of your RAM and close the pop-up window. You will once again be taken back to the previous screen, Finally click "Next" to move on to the next screen.

    Some of you may have noticed that I didn't use all of the space on my Hard drive. I did this because after I've installed Fedora, I'll go back into windows and create a NTFS partition that uses the remaining space on that drive. This will allow me to share common files (mp3, word documents, etc...) between my Fedora installation and Windows.

    Now the next screen of the installation will ask about installing GRUB, if you have all other devices disconnected you don't need to change anything on this page, go ahead and click "Next"

    The Next screen will ask about network devices. Leaving all of these settings alone as well, is best for most users.

    The next screen asks you to select a large city in your timezone, select the closest city (for me NYC) and click Next.

    Now it will ask you to create a root password. Make sure to remember this you need this to do things like install software The root user in Linux is like the total system Administrator. Most the time on Linux systems you do not want to work as the root user because the root has tons of power (and remember what you learned from Spider-man "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" ) The root user has the ability to completely delete everything on the hard drive so you shouldn't use it for most tasks (like word processing, surfing the web, listening to music ect). If you need "root" access to do something (like install software) a window will pop up asking you for the root password which will let you do what you need to do then go back to your status as a normal user. After you have created a root password click "Next".

    The next screen will ask you about what packages you want to install on your system, For Most systems you should select the Office option as well as the development option. I know what you're thinking "But I don't write any software, why do I need the software development tools?" Well some programs for Linux only can be downloaded as their source code (although this is becoming less and less common). The third option relates to running a server. If you think you'll run a FTP server, a Database Server or Web server ect on your Linux machine select this option otherwise its a bit overkill. Before clicking next I suggest that you select the "Customize Now" radio button on the bottom of the screen, this will give you a more detailed list of what is and isn't set to be installed on your system when you click next.

    Now if you selected the "Customize Now" option you will see a more detailed list about the software to be installed. Categories are on the left and specific packages pertaining to the selected category is on the right. Now go through each of the categories and check to see if there is any other software you think you'll need. When first getting started with Linux installing software can be a bit confusing at first (at least it was for me) so if you think there is a slim chance that you MIGHT possibly need a package, go ahead and install it to be on the safe side

    I HIGHLY recommend adding both GNOME and KDE under the desktop environment. I personally use KDE since I think it a little easier for people switching from Windows but alot of people perfer GNOME (it seems to be the more popular of the two main Desktop environments, but there are numerous others that you could download and install as well) Install them both and see which one you like better; its extremely easy to switch back and forth between the two.

    After you have all of your software installed that you want, go ahead and click Next and it should begin the installation.

    After the installation turn off your system and reconnect all of your hard drives. Turn on your computer, when the system first loads press the appropriate key to enter your one time boot menu (its F12 on my Dell laptop but it varies based on manufactures) and then select USB device and it will begin to start Fedora. If you want to set you system to start Fedora by default, enter the BIOS setup screen (F2 for me) and change the boot order of your drives so that USB device is above Internal HD, then to boot windows you'll enter the one time boot menu and select "Internal HD"


    Hope that can be of some help to my fellow newbies out there, if you have any questions comments or suggestions about anything please let me know.

    Good Luck,
    Scott

  2. #2
    Jman Guest
    Moved to how tos, thanks.

  3. #3
    Robaldo Guest

    GRUB... hang...

    A great post onuhwt, thank you.

    Perhaps someone can help me.

    I'm installing Fedora 8 onto a USB drive.

    It all installs ok (via the usb), but when booting from the usb I just get a blank screen with "GRUB" in the top left corner.

    If I insert the drive inside the belly of the pc then it boots up just fine, it's only when I attempt to run it through USB.

    The bios can talk to the usb drive, it knows it's there and appears to start reading and the *bam* "GRUB"

    help!

    PS - I just removed and tried to boot the internal HDD via usb (windowsXP) which gives the message "Missing Operating System". BIOS not managing to communicate via usb?
    Last edited by Robaldo; 26th January 2008 at 12:59 AM. Reason: ps

  4. #4
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    Sorry I don't check the Fedora Forum that often and I assume that you have already found a solution to your problem. In case you haven't, or if anyone else has a similar problem. From what I read it appears that this happens if you change the order of hard drives or other system hardware, or if GRUB becomes corrupted. The simplest fix would probably be to reinstall the grub boot loader by doing the following

    MAKE SURE YOU ONLY PERFORM THIS TASK ON THE CORRECT HARD DRIVE OTHERWISE YOU COULD CORRUPT YOUR INTERNAL HD'S MBR


    1. Boot with your Fedora installation disk.
    2. Select Rescue installed system
    3. Follow directions & respond to prompts (answer "No" to network).
    4. When you reach the prompt type: chroot /mnt/sysimage
    5. At the sh prompt type: /sbin/grub-install --recheck /dev/sdb
    Where sdb is your external drive, if it isn't select the correct letter of your drive
    6. type: exit
    7. type exit again
    8. Reboot without the Rescue CD

    Again sorry for not checking back that often hope that helps you or someone

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