[Mageia-discuss] Bootable external drive

[Phil]

On 27/09/12 20:55, John Bowden wrote:
>
> You might find the ext hd is a bit slow at initalizing and spinning up to
> speed, a usb drive does not have to spin up disks. Try powering on the laptop
> and if it does not see the ext hd do a soft reboot (ALT CTRL + DEL).
> Also make sure the bios is set to boot ext usb first before looking at other
> boot devices. If you have the ext hd plugged in and powered up while in the
> bios screen it might offer you the ext hd IF you are very lucky!

Thanks again John,

I've solved the external USB hard drive boot problem and it's 
embarrassing to admit that it was a simple setting in the BIOS.

The hard drive contained a live distribution but saved data is not 
persistent between boots and only a small section of the disc is 
available anyway.

So I partition the external hard drive and downloaded the iso file 
again, now the blasted DVD drive has died completely (it was always 
flaky from new) so I'm thwarted again; maybe an external USB DVD drive 
would be the answer?

Not to be outwitted by a dumb machine, I created a bootable USB memory 
stick, again with unetbootin. This time a message is displayed that 
reads something to the effect that the external device should be removed 
to continue the boot process.

There aren't any more hidden BIOS settings, that I can see, so it might 
be the end of the line for this project.

-- 
Regards,
Phil