On 03/04/16 17:10, John Pilkington wrote:
>>
> 
> I've had an interesting week with a new 3TB drive and a family box that has
> been running MS Vista for years.  I disconnected the Windows HD 'for safety'
> and installed kubuntu from the live DVD, with few problems until I tried a
> 'real' boot, which failed.  Eventually I installed buntu 14 with grub
> alongside Vista on the original HD, and also have buntu 16 beta on the new
> one; at present they will all boot and run.  Don't know if SL7 would do the
> same.  But the USB drive exploit looks handy.

This should work on the majority of all Linux distributions, at least if you
use UUID for the /boot partitionsi.  Use of LVM can also simplify mounting the
root parition (/) and so on - unless you use UUID for those mount points too.

I've booted several old Linux installations from hardrives put into a USB
closure. I haven't tried to do that with Windows though, that might work too -
but somehow I imagine it will freak out at some point where drive letters
won't match properly.

To get an overview you can run 'blkid' or 'lsblk -o NAME,UUID' on your system
to see all devices and their unique UUID.  These tools are also valuable when
you need to modify /etc/crypttab manually.


--
kind regards,

David Sommerseth