Install Linux on External Hard Disk or Pen Drive

 1. Why to install OS on external hard-disk or pen drive?

        The main reason is mobility. Carrying laptop every where is more difficult than carrying pen drive or External hard-disk. If you have any system available in your office or college, then you can simply do your work by booting through external hard-disk and after completing your work you can carry it to your home and restart the work by booting through external hard-disk.

2. Requirement

• External hard-disk with at least free space which fulfills the requirement of your OS.
• Bootable CD/DVD or bootable pen drive.
• Please check system hardware (which you want to access using OS installed on external hard-disk) whether it supports booting from USB or not. Many recent hardware support booting from external hard-disk or pen drive.

3. How to install Linux on external hard-disk?

       First create one free partition which we can use for installing Linux as follow.
1. Right click on My Computer in Windows OS then click on manage ->Storage ->Disk Management Then you will get screen as shown in image below.
       After this Right click on Disk 1 and click on Shrink Volume and follow the steps to create new disk drive.

       After creating free partition start installation as we do normal installation by restarting PC. You have to plug in external hard-disk or pen drive throughout  installation. Select installation type as "something else".

       First create boot sector with 500 MB which is require to store grub.

Second create root drive with size you want to use for Linux.

Third you must have to create swap partition which is used for storing swap files in hard disk which is faster than other drive.

The main Part of your installation is selecting proper drive to install boot loader. You must select the drive partition which is used for the external hard disk. You can get list of drives by giving command " fdisk -l " in Linux or by going to computer management in Windows as shown earlier. In Linux for every new hard disk or pen drive it appends letter from a-z to sd*, sda is for first disk sdb is for second and so on. You can select proper drive as shown in following image.

Now you can start installation by clicking install now.

After completing installation restart your system go to boot menu