[LIVE] Beginner Questions about external USB Hard Drives and partitions
#1
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Hi,
First of all: Thank you for this wonderful project! Even though I'm sure I don't understand half of its capablities, I really appreciate all the work you guys put in there!

I have the following idea in my head:
I just bought a 500 GB HP SimpleSave USB Hard drive. Now I want to create 2 partitions, 1 with the actual XBMC install and 1 with the media stuff on it.
I want this hard drive to work as my portable Media Center, so that if I go over to a friend, I just need to plug in the hard drive into his computer, boot from it and have everything set up, ready and working.

Is this (theoretically) possible? Does it make sense to make 2 partitions? How about stuff like Networking? (I have an Android phone and it would be plain awesome, if the remote would work)

Right now I'm working with a Win 7 (64bit) Laptop.


Things I tried so far:

-Format the whole hard drive to FAT32 with RMPrebUSB (MAX size, Win7 bootable [BOOTMGR], FAT32)
-Put xbmc-10.0-live.iso on there with unetbootin on there (show all drives, since it doesn't show up under usb)
-Boot from USB => "BOOTMGR is missing"


-Format the hard drive to FAT32 with RMPrebUSB (MAX size, Win7 bootable [BOOTMGR], FAT32)
-Put xbmc-10.0-live.iso on there with LiLi (Hide Files, Format with FAT32, no LinuxLive-start)
-boot from USB => I end up in a Grub command line where I don't know what to do


-Delete all Volumes and create a 8 GB sized (FAT32) one with Disk Management, leave the rest of the hard drive "empty"
-repeat LiLi-step
-boot from USB => I end up in a Grub command line where I don't know what to do


-Delete all Volumes and create a 8 GB sized (FAT32) one with Disk Management, leave the rest of the hard drive "empty"
-repeat unetbootin-step
-Bios doesn't recognize hard drive and boots Windows


As you can see I don't really have much of a clue what I'm doing, I'm just pursuing the trial and error method.

What's even more frustrating: I managed to get it to work once yesterday, but it was only one big FAT32 partition, so I wanted to try it with 2 partitions. Now I forgot what I did do make it work -.-

Any help is appreciated, even if you tell me that the idea is not really smart or not possible.

Thank you!
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#2
Well, after some more searching I found the solution (just in case someone else is running into the same trouble):

1. Create a bootable USB-Stick with you live.iso and unetbootin
2. Boot it
3. Select install
4. Follow all the steps until you can select the hard drive mode
5. Select manual
6. Create the following partitions
-6gb EXT4, mount point "/", select boot
-2gb Swap
-12gb EXT4, mount pont "/home"
7. leave the rest untouched and format it in windows later

Hope someone can use this...
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#3
do you know why you first have to install to usb-stick?

why can't we install to usb hard drives directly?
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[LIVE] Beginner Questions about external USB Hard Drives and partitions0