how to install linux on an external hard drive

This guide goes over procedures for a single partition drive install only. Do you want any of the partitions to be larger than 2 TB?.How do you want to divide the free space? As a single partition, or as several?.Will the drive need to be accessible from both Ubuntu and Windows?.Will the drive be used only with Ubuntu?.

Before beginning, you need to consider for what you will be using the hard drive. Use this guide to help you install a new hard drive with an existing Ubuntu system, and partition it for use. Combining “lshw” with the “grep” command, you can retrieve specific information about a disk on your system.While it's not every day that you need to add a new hard drive to your computer, the task does not have to be complicated. In order to list disk information on Linux, you have to use the “lshw” with the “class” option specifying “disk”. If I want to remove a disk from my Linux machine, knowing the actual physical port or the vendor can be quite useful. However, in some cases, you are interested in listing your disks with the actual hardware information linked to it. Mountpoint : if your filesystem is mounted, you should be able to see the actual mountpoint.Īwesome, you successfully listed your disks on Linux using “lsblk”.This identifier should be unique worldwide and uniquely identify your device Label : in some cases, in order to avoid using a UUID, you can choose to have a label for your device.Filesystem type : if your partition contains a filesystem, it should be listed in this column (xfs, swap or encrypted devices).“sd” in this case refers to SCSI devices but it is also short for SATA connections as most drives use SATA nowadays It is quite important for you to know that Linux devices have a specific prefix depending on the nature of the device. By executing the “ lsblk” command, you are presented with multiple different columns :

How to install linux on an external hard drive