Installing LL to external drive

[gold_finger]

Congrats on getting install done!  Don't know why you had problem running GParted from live USB, but good job switching to doing the partitioning from your installed system instead to overcome problem.

...but there were some differences from the sequence 7 to 9.  ...creating the actual partitions (7 & 8 ) had to be 'added' from the 'partition' tab and 'applied' from the edit tab.

Good job figuring that out.  There are a series of graphical buttons along top of GParted window, but they are not labeled.  If you hover mouse over them they'll show description of what they are.  First one on left is to create new partitions; last one on right is to apply pending operations.  Using either the buttons or options under menu headings (what you did) accomplish same thing.

Restarted the install USB but on selecting 'something else' (step 10) the installer repeatedly crashed. So i switched from my toshiba to my HP laptop (which is much higher spec) and things finally got me to the end.

Don't know what may have been cause of that, but good job switching to different machine and getting it done there.

but even so in steps 7 & 8 it didn't like the live USB giving a 'libparted error' 'invalid partition table - recursive partition on drive /dev/sdb', fortunately it gives the option to ignore this which is what i did.

That's actually normal behavior when using a live USB, but I forgot to mention that.  Ignoring the error is correct thing to do, so good job on that as well.


Just a quick note:  since you ended up using your installed system to partition the external drive, you may want to repeat my step #2 on that machine and re-check the first three boxes under "Removable Storage" to put it back to default values (if you had not changed them before on your own).  That will make sure that system automatically mounts and opens things you plug into it (eg. USB sticks).  If you don't change that back, then things like USBs or DVDs will need to be manually mounted using either the graphical file manager or with terminal commands before you can use them.