How to get my Dell Dimension 4100 to boot from external Hard Drive?

Recently my husband installed Ubuntu onto an external Hard Drive and it works for the Acer Aspire but it does not work for the Dell Dimension 4100. I have not told him I tried this, but I just want to be able to get it right without him telling me.How to get my Dell Dimension 4100 to boot from external Hard Drive?If your husband installed Ubuntu on the Acer on an external hard drive it will only work on that unit, Ubuntu will configure itself for the unit it is installed on.

If you want to use it on another computer then install it on that, I teach people some of these Linux products and although we have created our engineers a special hard drive that can plug into different computers and work you generally need to keep the drive with the computer it has been installed on.



Personally it's better to install it to the built in hard drive and use any external drives for data storage and backup.How to get my Dell Dimension 4100 to boot from external Hard Drive?You need to change a setting in the BIOS. Most computers will not boot from an external device unless you tell them to. You have 2 choices...

1. Just as the computer starts, look for a message to go into 'boot options' or something similar. Normally you have to press F12 or something similar. Here you can tell it to boot (just this time) off the external drive.

2. Go into the BIOS (normally you press delete or F2/F3) and look in here for an option to change the boot priority/sequence. You need to alter the priority so it looks for an external driver BEFORE it boots from the internal one.

Either of the above will show your Husband a thing or two....! How to get my Dell Dimension 4100 to boot from external Hard Drive?It depends on the manufacturer on this one. Dell BIOS does not have a standard function to boot from USB were as Acer does. Genrally if your BIOS is more than a year old then booting from USB wont be an option as only CD Hard drive and floppy appear. Yuo will need to find an update or "Flash" for yuor BIOS to enable this function. This therefore will allow you to boot from external hard drive





PS please ignor ignorant people like j.b.w who seem to think the world revolves around them