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Linux on Hard Drive Partition, Bootloader on USB Flash Drive

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http://unix.stackexchange.com – How can I use a USB flash drive to boot Linux from a partition on (another) hard drive? I'm trying to install Linux on an encrypted partition on the hard drive (using LVM on LUKS). Since /boot must be on a separate, unencrypted partition, I would like to store it on a USB flash drive. My plan was to install GRUB (2) to the flash drive (/dev/sdb) and boot Linux from it's MBR, or if the drive was unplugged simply boot Windows from the hard drive's (/dev/sda) MBR. I installed GRUB (2) to /dev/sdb, but when I tried to boot from the flash drive I got the following message: Grub Loading Afte (HowTos)

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Submitted by missing on 11/02/2012 – Made popular on 11/02/2012

Stories similar to Linux on Hard Drive Partition, Bootloader on USB Flash Drive

Hello all..:D I have a good Redhat 9 install on my hard drive. But I need to use this install on another computer. So I formatted an USB flash drive as ext3, installed grub in it and copied my existing / filesystem on the hard drive to the USB flash drive.

For testing the install, I disabled my hard drive, floppy drive and CDROM drive in the BIOS setup.

Welcome back to the daring adventures of TalkUbuntu! Here is the lowdown:

Hi, I am new to linux and this is my first linux installation.

I tried making a boot-able flash drive like described in the install guide, here, on the wiki.Using Unetbootin - did it - didn't boot from the flash drive (just doesn't work).I thought: Hei, I'll do it again maybe I did something wrong.No way - my flash drive is now 8MB (and it was a 32GB FLASH DRIVE!!).I tried everything, fdisk, diskpart in windows, Killdisk ...

Move GRUB from USB to HD 41 weeks 1 day ago

When I installed Linux debian 2.6 and GRUB I managed to install it, the boot loader, on a usb flash drive. Right now, If the USB drive is plugged into the computer, the GRUB and the OS starts, otherwise, if the usb is out, nothing happens.

There are some grub files in /boot/grub/ and /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/ but there's no e.g.

I have two drives. Drive A has windows xp on it (only 1 partition) and the partition is encrypted with TrueCrypt. Drive B has a boot partition that has GRUB2 stuff on it and also an LVM partition that has Arch Linux in it.

I have a 320gb USB hard drive, one partition for my files, one for playing Wii games, and one which I would like to use for an Ubuntu instillation.

To do this, I partitioned my disk accordingly using Windows, then booted from the Ubuntu CD to install the OS to my external hard drive partition.

I had installed Ubuntu 10.04 onto an external hard drive connected by USB to my laptop:

sdd partition

Windoze still resides on the box's internal hard drive:

sda2 partition

I also partitioned the internal hard drive so that I have a repository where my documents etc can be accessed by either linux or windoze:

This how to shows how grub2 can be used to boot a PowerPC live/desktop iso file stored on a USB flash drive. It is an alternative to using the dd command or extracting the contents of the iso file.

This method is so easy my dog could do it!

I've tested this on a fat32 flash drive using an MS-DOS partition table.