Hello everyone I know this might be a simple question but I gonna ask it anyway. I wanted to know if I can install Ubuntu mate on a external hard drive and will it work the same like if it was on a internal hard drive
I have a western digital 500-GB drive I would like to get good use of
Thanks so much
Yes, it will work. I have done it myself. Just make sure, when you have done it, to go into BIOS and list your external drive as being the first drive the system tries to boot from. However, depending on the speed of your USB connection (I am assuming this is how your external drive is connected) it may take longer than usual to boot.
Hi Steve thanks for the fast reply, How did it work for you when you had Ubuntu installed on the external drive? I’m trying to get a idea if it’s something that’s worth the efford
It works okay. Expect potentially longer booting times and also saving and loading of files, though. Apart from that, no problem.
Thank you sir for your time. I will experiment with it to see how it runs
I guess this would good for just browsing the web and stuff I don’t really download that many files and such. Would I be able to install a 64-bit ISO file on this external drive?
Have a great weekend
I used to run Ubuntu MATE 16.04 off a USB 2.0 harddisk for a while and I’ve got really no complaints about performance.
Sure, an SSD is night-and-day faster, but compared to an internal WD Blue HD the USB drive wasn’t noticeably slower in disk-intensive games like LOTRO (run via wine, has rather long loading times).
Thanks for the info, I have it all installed on the 500 GB ext drive and it runs really well I did not realize it would be of good. As far as speed is concerned it’s not bad at all
hello Robgoss, it works well, I did a year ago, but then really did not give use and uninstall it, you’ll like it more when you boot your program on the laptop of a friend, yes you can, but it will take more on startup, and work just as well. if you have installed ubuntu mate 32-bit you can run on other computers with 32 bits and 64 bits. operating speed depends on the USB port. I have it installed on a microSD 64Gb , it is perfect. but in this case without swap. regards…
I’ve actually done this several times. If the primary OS is Windows 10 you have to remember that the efi partition is going to be the second partition. The first will be a system reserve that Windows creates. I don’t use Windows so I don’t worry about that.
The last time I did this I actually used a 4 port usb hub with 4 128gb flash drives plugged into it. I had the main OS Ubuntu Mate 16.04 installed on the internal drive of laptop, and had 4 other distribution installed each on it’s their flash drive. The only partitions on the flash drives were / and /home. Using the flash drives the efi partition on the internal drive had to be used. This created a few issues during the boot process if the drives were not attached, causing grub to boot to a prompt. The work around was to have separate options in the bios under OS manager to choose from. 1 for external drive only, and one for when the others were attached.
I have done this process in the past using a WD Pasport 1tb external and was able to do the install partitioning and efi partition on the external drive ans well. After install with external drive attached, bios set to with the external drive set before the eternal in the bios boot order I was able to open the bios OS Manager with the external drive connected and choose the loader to boot from. If I chose the external option there were entries in grub as well for the OS on the internal drive. If the option for the internal drive was selected it would be the only OS choice in the grub menu.
Hi everyone, I installed my ubuntu-mate on my Sandisk cz80 usb drive(I think it’s an SSD-like device), and it works well, except I can’t boot it after I got my win10 installed onto a msata drive. How could I solve this problem? I search a lot but there is no similar problem asked before.
If I want to exchange my usb to an SSD hard disk, will the problem of not booting happen again?
The blogs are about the results, not how to actually do it. Where can I find the actual method (methods) the blogs talk about?
At a guess, I would think you could do the following:
Get hold of 2 USB’s. Put the UM iso on one and leave the other blank and then plug them both in. Then, boot from the Live UM USB you put the ISO on. Once logged in, install UM to the second (blank) USB by selecting it from the installation dialog box drop down list of drives.