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I have a former internal hard drive, which I now use as external USB drive. I tried to boot from it, but it doesn't work (2 PCs tried, on my: blank screen + blinking cursor). This - I think - is normal, because to make a USB device bootable it must be prepared before the installation / during formating.

Since I don't understand, if the situation of other threads here fit on mine, please tell me:

Is it possible to boot the system, which is already on the external drive (and which has worked, when it was an internal drive).

My ideas were:

  • use this device in a virtual machine as already installed system or try to boot from it (which doesn't work, since it's not prepared).
  • change grub on the system, where I attach the external HDD

Edit: I have used gparted to set the partition as active / bootable. Buuuut: it is a logical partition and not the first on the HDD. When I now try to boot from the computer gets into a reset loop: right after the BIOS messages my computer restarts instead of booting.

Thanks!

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    Did you enable boot from USB in the BIOS? Commented Jun 30, 2014 at 20:35
  • Creek: yes, I did on both computers. Commented Jul 1, 2014 at 0:21

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You can make a partition bootable with out making an other changes. Also you may try re-installing grub on the hard disk, which should not hurt the partitions either.

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  • coteyr: yes, thanks. gparted helped me setting "bootable". I'll try the reinstallation. Commented Jul 1, 2014 at 13:59
  • coteyr: is re-installing really that complicated? (I can't just do it from my current installation, instead I need to have a live CD. Probably because doing grub-install on the current booted system will add a wrong list of possibilities to boot, right?) Commented Jul 2, 2014 at 19:23
  • no it's easy. Usually you just run grub-install. sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sdX Make sure to mount and change the device, but you can do this from a running system as well. community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/245 Commented Jul 2, 2014 at 19:38
  • Wow, that was really. Should have asked earlier instead of searching the web, not understanding the man-page of grub-install, etc :) Commented Jul 3, 2014 at 11:53

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