Installing OS to external HDD

[Hb_Kai]

Hey, long time no see :)

I'm today purchasing a new external hard drive for my laptop and I am planning to install Linux on it but I have never really seen the option to install an OS to a second hard drive on a computer before, only usually seeing that the OS set up goes straight to installing to the main hard drive.

I was wondering if anybody knows how to do this? Do I have to set up the external hard drive to run as the main hard drive and set the internal hard drive as a Slave in the BIOS or something?

I wanted to ask before going and looking around on the BIOS. :)

[-pops-]

Try this:

Check that the motherboard has its own USB drivers. If it has then:

Enter the BIOS and rearrange the boot order CD, USB, HDD (then whatever else you want).

With this setup, provided there is no bootable CD in the drive, it will open a bootable USB device as the second option. If there is no suitable USB device, the BIOS will go on to the next device in its list.

This worked for me on one machine and not on another. I don't know why.

[Hb_Kai]

Thanks for your answer but how would I check if my motherboard has its own USB drivers?

And it's not important but my BIOS doesn't auto-run the bootable disc automatically, I have to go into the boot options via F12 and select Boot from CD/DVD :)

[Hb_Kai]

Nevermind. I've got it sorted all now, well most of it. :)

Thanks for the reply though.