Does R5E50 support installing onto external hard drives (USB in this case) if that's the ONLY HD on a back-end system?

Also, does it support eSATA (I know it works with SATA drives, so I'd imagine an external SATA drive would work too).

The reason I ask is that I'd like to "play" with my system without trashing it, so I figured I could use a USB drive to "blow up".

Thanks!

Don't know. You can always try it. Attach the drive. Toss in the CD, boot from it, and take the auto install or auto upgrade option. You should see a menu of the detected drives. If your external drive isn't listed you can always abort.

Hi,

The trick would be the boot, I have installed to external sata drive and then put it into a different machine for the long term home with out much issue. I did have to play with the boot loader.

Since you are going to be trying the external method, you may have to research boot loaders a little. Grub is the most friendly as you can make changes at boot time. To run lilo -v on the external drive required some trick which I don't recall the details. (knew I should have written it down)

Maybe experiment with dsl or ubuntu but if you can get a boot installed and the machine will boot usb, it should work.

Mike

Thanks for the help. The only thing I could find on here was an old (2005, EARLY 2006) that mentioned something about KnoppMyth (or maybe linux in general) "re-assigning" the boot devices after boot and it would mess things up. (ie, on boot it would see as dev/something, but after install, it gets reassigned to dev/something else and then lilo would crap out). But we'll find out in a few days when my external USB comes in.

Well yes it will do the install, but it won't boot after the install. The problem is that the initrd does not recognize that the usb modules are needed. The fix is in the works for the next release (after SCALE).

Thanks for the info (so I don't waste my time).

Although I suppose if I was linux savvy, I could tweak the initrd myself (if I knew what I was doing) haha.

Hi,

If I recall correctly there was a member that had step by step of how to add the needed pieces. I think Cecil also offered a few tips in how to add the driver. Probably in the past 6 months.....

Mike

Another hint, when you set up the mount point on a "scsi" device (scsi, sata, usb storage, ...) use the volume label rather than the device name. E.g. the following extracted from my /etc/fstab: