Zorin on external drive for UEFI only bios

Installing Zorin OS
1

I am trying to use Zorin on an Alienware m18 r2.
Windows sees the drive but the BIOS does not.
The BIOS is UEFI only so I have to manually add the external usb hd, as the boot menu will not see the drive. What file do I need to manually point to for the computer to load Zorin?
Any help or suggestions?
Thanks

2

Welcome to the forum!

A few questions to understand what you are trying to do:

  1. Do you want to keep windows on the computer while also installing Zorin? If so, you might want to check this dual-boot guide.

  2. Do I understand well that you want to install Zorin on a separate drive? Is that a SSD or HDD? If the latter, I've seen somewhere else in the forum that it will probably be very slow to run. If you have a SSD available that might be better, or use the guide to shrink your existing Windows partition which is probably on a SSD. That being said you should be able to try the HDD, but maybe your problem is:

  3. Did you make a USB stick installer with ZorinOS on it (see the guide I linked or the default ZorinOs guide for how to make that.)? If you are trying to install from and write to the HDD that would cause problems.

Hope this helps, let us know how it goes!

1 Like
3

Welcome to the Forum!

How is this external Drive formatted? Is it a HDD or SSD? Has it GPT or MBR Partitions Sheme? When You start Zorin from an USB Stick in Live Mode and choose there GParted and Disks, is the Drive detected?