making a bootable, 'portable' usb drive

Question

I have a leftover laptop drive and sata - usb adapter. I'd like to make it bootable and 'portable'. Would it be able to recognize host machine's network card for instance? For the sake of experiment I installed latest distro of Suse (curiosity). All went well except when it booted it would not recognize my wireless network. I shut down the laptop I had it plugged into, un-plugged it and tried to boot the laptop. Of course grub was hosed ( fixed it with no problems ). The interesting thing was when I booted from Ubuntu Live CD to fix grub, my wireless network was recognized just fine. When I tried to plug in the usb drive, rebooted and hoped to boot into the usb drive - no joy.

Any suggestions on where to start with making such an autonomous Ubuntu set up?

4/11/13 Figured it out. Took my desktop and unplugged all the hardrives. Booted from live dvd. Plugged in the laptop drive through usb connector. Run installer and got a 'normal' install on the hard drive. Note to self: get eSATA case and cable for the drive, booting from the drive via usb a bit too slow.

Have you looked this post? : How do I install Ubuntu from an USB drive / create a live USB-stick? — Lucio, Apr 07 '13 at 23:38
You should create a new answer instead of mention the solution into the question. — Lucio, Apr 12 '13 at 17:47
... I wanted to, but could find the new answer link/button. I wonder if that's not an option now. — vector, Apr 12 '13 at 21:09

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 07 '13 at 23:44

1

Try Unetbootin to write the ISO. I had the same issue with SUSE not recognizing network cards, but Ubuntu works great in that regard. Good luck.

answered Apr 07 '13 at 23:44

Razick

672

Not quite what I was looking for, but good enough. Now I've been going nuts trying different distros like ice cream. Stopped wasting cds and dvd ;-) – vector Apr 12 '13 at 02:16

making a bootable, 'portable' usb drive

1 Answers1