External hard drive

[moonbounce]

I have two old IDE hard drives that I formatted, one was an 80 GB hard drive and the other a 30 GB.The 80 GB hard drive I am using as a backup for my computer, I put a mirror image of my laptop on n it. The 30 GB was too small to do any backup.

What I would like to do with the 30 GB is put a version of Linux on it and use it for learning a Linux distro. What I need to know is how would I get Linux to run on startup instead of Windows 7. Or should I say is this possible?

Tks
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[troymail]

How are you connecting the spare drives to the PC?

I use a USB caddy/adapter to connect old hard drives and I believe you can interrupt the PC startup (press F12 or some other key sequence) and tell the system to boot from a different source/drive.

 

[moonbounce]

I have a hard drive enclosure that plugs into the old hard drive to provide power and data stream. What i need to figure out is how to tell the computer to start from the external hard drive if it is even possible.

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[FKimble]

Look in your bias. There should be a place to tell PC what device to boot from.

 

[troymail]

I think FK means "bios". There is usual a "boot order" that you can set there (old days: C: drive, D: CD/DVD, A: drive floppy, etc.). That is a possible option.

When your PC first starts up, you should see a quick flash of a message like "Hit F12 to enter setup" or something like that. This is where you'd either update your boot settings and/or "on the fly" select a different boot source.

 

[FKimble]

Troymail, tks for the correction, yes bios was what I meant.

 

[jwt873]

What computer How old is it? (Laptop? Desktop?)

If you have a spare IDE drive header on the motherboard or on an internal IDE card, just install the IDE drive inside the case. Supply power to the drive and run a ribbon cable from the drive to the header.

When you install Linux, tell it to install on the empty IDE drive. After that, it will set up GRUB or LILO to access that drive when you boot.

 

[moonbounce]

So it is an old PATA hard drive there is no motherboard header for it only for the SATA hard drive, I want to put it on my laptop anyways. I have downloaded Linux Mint 18.1 onto the old drive and I have burned it to a disk. Now I am going to transfer that to a USB drive and partition my hard drive and run it from there ( I hope).

When I downloaded Mint onto the external hard drive the only option you have at that point is to burn it to a disk, do that is what I did and then reformatted my old hard drive. I originally thought that I could just run it off the hard drive. My plan is in the future to dump Windows and stay with Linux.

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