Installation on external USB harddisk? [and other issues]
A colleague tried this and failed, so I better ask first.
Environment:
- some relatively new Dell Latitude D800 notebook (i386)
- Windows XP occupies 100% of the internal disk (/dev/hda)
(and is recognised by the current installer)
- external USB 160GB Maxtor harddisk (/dev/sda) 100% for Debian
- installation medium: netinst CD (~115 MB)
- installation with either beta4 or current of 2004-05-24 works,
GRUB and/or LILO can be installed on the MBR of /dev/sda, as
my collegue did not want to overwrite his /dev/hda-MBR
- kernel 2.4 and 2.6 start booting, but are panicking during boot
(I can ask, at which point exactly, if this helps)
No formal installation report, as no second stage installation
was possible.
Other issues, my colleague complainded about:
1. If the installation failed at some point, one cannot do the
"install base system" step again - it fails. Instead one has
not only to redo the partition step again, but one has to
remove(!) the partition and recreate them. Otherwise cruft
on the partition stops the base system installation.
2. It would be nice, if the installer gives a friendly warning,
if one forgets to create a swap partition :-)
3. There are still display problems with kernel 2.6 (not only
in beta4!) when switching consoles sometimes.
4. New users do not know what "Debconf priority" means. This
is Debian newspeak :-)
Cheers, WB
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