Personally, I’d use an install CD/DVD to install on the external drive and let it put the requisite GRUB stuff into sda, THEN either copy the home dir from sda to the external drive, or set the external drive up to mount /home from sda (assuming the internal drive comes up as SDA).

NOTE! WARNING! BEWARE!!! DD will almost certainly copy the UUID from the source partition to the destination partition! I do NOT know what havoc will result when linux looks for that UUID and finds 2…. (I’d guess it takes the first one it finds, which may or may not be what you wanted).

(I know about the UUID copy because I do that here at work all the time. In my case, it’s a feature. In your case, it’s a bug)

I’m hoping my subscription request will work and you won’t need to reply-all to get the rest of Plug to see this. (Our IT re-writes outgoing email addresses, so I’m hoping I guessed the outgoing address right!)

Rusty

From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Michael
Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2016 4:06 PM
To: PLUG
Subject: Re: install linux on an external drive

here is a slight snafu.... if I dd everything copies exactly as is. My / and /home are on separate directories. I suppose before i reboot I would just erase everything in fstab. I should probably do a swap file instead of swap drive on the external. No? How should I tell it to use the external drive for the swap file? In fstab?

# swap was on /dev/sdb5 during installation

UUID=b45d28c4-edc6-4f9a-a80b-144e20197cf8 none swap sw

no. I guess I will use a swap drive after all. So before I dd I will need to partition the external How do I discover the UUID that has been assigned to the drive. so I can put it in fstab after I run dd?

On Sun, Oct 23, 2016 at 2:49 PM, Michael <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:

I know it is attempting to load from the external because it is giving me some strange errors now that I have it plugged in when I restart the computer. I get a modprobe error and two different usb errors. Is this a case where I should use dd?

On Sun, Oct 23, 2016 at 2:02 PM, Michael <bmike1@gmail.com> wrote:

I got the external drive but how do I install linux on it so I can boot from it?

--

:-)~MIKE~(-: