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persistent and portable installation to boot on any laptop

Ask for help with issues regarding the Installations of the Debian O/S.
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ardawan
Posts: 10
Joined: 2017-06-08 05:36

persistent and portable installation to boot on any laptop

#1 Post by ardawan »

[SOLVED]
How can I carry my hard drive anywhere and use my Debian on other machines?
Many companies that I'm going to work, they use windows(which I hate to even use it for 1sec), they're okay with me to install my favorite OS(Linux). I'm tired to install every time for any company that I join :x . so I decided to have my portable Debian on my external SSD hard drive and boot it on any companies machine.

Problem
I installed my Debian 8 on my external hard drive using my MacBook.
When I connect my hard drive to MacBook, will load GRUB & I am able to boot my Debian. :D
The Problem is I can't get GRUB on other laptops(for testing, HP laptop) which windows installed on it already. :(

What I've done:
-I did change the boot loader to USB CD-ROM ... on the BIOS setting too. Still, doesn't work.
-I did install GRUB on /home partition. (grub-install /dev/sd...)

How can I fix this?
Should I install in a specific way?

You guys can help me a lot, Thanks

EDIT
some people on other communities told me to install grub on my hard drive using "grub-install /dev/sdxx"
The result was:
installation finished. no error reported.
But on tried to boot on another laptop. doesn't​ work :!: .
Last edited by ardawan on 2017-06-16 03:24, edited 2 times in total.

Dai_trying
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Re: persistent and portable installation to boot on any lapt

#2 Post by Dai_trying »

I'm not sure my post will really help much but I have found it very difficult to get a truly portable distro (any) and although you will be able to get it to work on many machines (after adjusting bios sometimes) it will be (almost) impossible to get it to boot on both UEFI and BIOS machines, UEFI seems to be the most troublesome for portable, when I tried to do this it added an entry to the UEFI bootloader so it became permanent which wasn't a big deal really, but a UEFI install wouldn't boot on a BIOS machine (and vice versa). I couldn't get both versions of grub to work together, but I didn't really spend too much time looking into the reasons for this so you might have better luck.

If you do manage to get a truly portable install please post here how you did it as I would certainly like to be able to do this too. :)

Bulkley
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Re: persistent and portable installation to boot on any lapt

#3 Post by Bulkley »

If I was going to do this I would install Tails with persistence on a portable drive. Then I would study it to see how they did it.

ardawan
Posts: 10
Joined: 2017-06-08 05:36

Re: persistent and portable installation to boot on any lapt

#4 Post by ardawan »

Bulkley wrote:If I was going to do this I would install Tails with persistence on a portable drive. Then I would study it to see how they did it.
I only want to use Debian distro.
If they could do this(start on almost any computer), I'm sure we can do this with Debian. but the question is how they did that :!:

peer
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Re: persistent and portable installation to boot on any lapt

#5 Post by peer »

I have put debian on a usb-stick with a normal installation. It tried it on all my desktops(3) and notebooks(5) in my house. It only refused to boot on one desktop (windows 10).

You need one usb-stick with debian (install or live)
You need one empty usb-stick (or external usb-drive)

easy way:
disable the harddisks in your computer (in bios or unplugging)
The start the debian installation and let debian do the work.
normal way:
Start the debian installation and choose for manual partitioning. Create a partition for / and a swap partition
make sure that you install grub on the target usb-stick!!!!

peer
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Re: persistent and portable installation to boot on any lapt

#6 Post by peer »

You wrote you have installed debian on a external disk and installed grub on the home-partition. This will not work

If your external disk is /dev/sdb the you should install grub with the command sudo grub-install /dev/sdb
Grub should be installed on the disk not on a partition

Dai_trying
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Re: persistent and portable installation to boot on any lapt

#7 Post by Dai_trying »

peer wrote:It only refused to boot on one desktop (windows 10).
This is the problem, it will not boot on UEFI systems... :( so only effective on a BIOS boot machine.

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