How to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive on an iMac?

Question

Here's my tools:

A new (2008) 24" iMac 3.06ghz, 2gb of ram, 250gb of hard drive space with windows vista ultimate installed.

A 500gb western digital My Book edition external hard drive.

A 250GB maxtor OneTouch II external hard drive.

I would like a guide to show me how to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive (either one hard drive is fine) on a mac. I have done a little research and know that I have to have a live cd and that I have to set up my computer to have the bios boot from cd but I am not sure how to do that on a mac. Any guide would be fine.

Answer 1

You should install Ubuntu on a separat partition. If you want it on the external harddisk, you should make room for the Ubuntu partition there by repartitioning that drive during installation.

Linux can read NTFS (Windows) partitions, and write to them if you install the ntfs-3g driver from Synaptic. All this must be done after install however, The preferred file system for Ubuntu Linux is ext3 and that is what the install procedure suggests.

Also, make sure you can boot from the external drive (through BIOS) before you install Ubuntu on it.

But remember to backup your data on that disk first! :)

u can Check all web site "Installing Ubuntu on an External Hard Drive"

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2007/11/13/...

http://ubuntukids.org/blog/?p=69

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/format-ext...

Answer 2

You can go to

https://help.ubuntu.com/

or

http://www.ubuntu.com/support

for help. Also try

http://ubuntuforums.org/

for user forums to help you figure it out. Do you have your Live CD yet?

If so, put it in your drive, making sure your external is connected, and reboot your computer. It may boot from the disk, if so, install it on the external.

You can try it without installing it, and it will run from the cd, and there will be a desktop environment with an install icon on the desktop. double click it, and choose the drive you wish to install it on, and follow the prompts. hope I helped, I just began using it about 2 weeks ago. It helps if you have Linux experience, I ran Debian for a couple of years on my server, but Ubuntu is great. Hope you enjoy!