how to boot ubuntu from external drive without drive letter

M

mhguda

Member
Hi, I have ubuntu 10.10 on a portable hard drive (60GB) that I use to boot different laptops (not necessarily my own, but mine, too). I can boot via the bios, but I would like to use easybcd and boot from a regular boot menu. The problem is that this drive does not have a drive letter associated with it, so windows (7, 32 bit) does not see it. In easybcd when I try to add its entry it does seem to be present, but when I reboot, ubuntu will not come up, and the entry points to Cdrive (where windows lives). Am I doing something wrong? Will the drive still be bootable if I assign a drive letter to it? It boots fine if it is the first drive in the list of boot choices... Thanks for any help.
 
Computer Guru said:
You need to enable legacy USB support in the BIOS.
Click to expand...

What do you mean? I see no option in my BIOS menu to enable anything to do with USB. But USB is enabled, I can boot from the drive if I make it the first boot device in the list. What I want is a boot menu that includes booting from it. Will I disable anything if I assign a drive letter from the windows disk management service? Will I be able to include the device as a boot option if I assign it a drive letter?
 
Windows cannot assign letters to file-systems it doesn't recognize (like Linux's).
When you say "BIOS menu", are you refering to the BIOS setup utility ?
(the splash screen will tell you how to enter it. e.g "Press 'del' to enter setup". OEMs use a variety of methods)
 
Terry60 said:
Windows cannot assign letters to file-systems it doesn't recognize (like Linux's).
When you say "BIOS menu", are you refering to the BIOS setup utility ?
(the splash screen will tell you how to enter it. e.g "Press 'del' to enter setup". OEMs use a variety of methods)
Click to expand...

Yes, that is what I mean.
 
On Phoenix BIOS setup, it's
Advanced > Onboard Device Config > USB Config > Legacy Support
 
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