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I'm having an old laptop with Intel Centrino processor and just 30 GB of hard disk. I have dual booted with Windows XP and Lubuntu 14.2. Windows XP has 20 GB and Lubuntu has 10 GB.

This is causing apps installation a challenge and I bought an external hard disk and a 32 GB pen drive to see if I could install the apps that I wanted on the external drive or 32 GB pen drive instead of the hard disk where the space is only about 4 GB left.

Is this possible, if so how can we do it?

USB drive is shown under /media/username/deviceid.

Wherever I search there is Ubuntu installation on USB is mentioned but not this type of a configuration.

Please help.

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    When you say "external hard drive" do you mean "large usb storage" or do you mean some sort of SATA drive? If the later, why not transfer your existing SATA drive contents to the new one, and fit the new hard drive, solving all the problems ? This may help..... askubuntu.com/questions/388932/cloning-dual-boot-drive/…
    – Piloti
    Oct 31, 2017 at 20:13
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    It is possible, but it is a hassle. You can make a partition and move large directories over such as /usr. You can compile software and tell it to install to the hard drive. To be honest, it is going to be easier for you to do a fresh install onto the hard drive.
    – Panther
    Oct 31, 2017 at 20:20
  • @Piloti has the right idea. Your external drive is probably a SATA drive inside some plastic. Take out the drive, mount in your computer. As Panther says - this is some work and not a good solution...
    – vidarlo
    Nov 1, 2017 at 5:53

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Use the full 30GB for Lubuntu which is plenty for any software you may want to install.

There's no point in keeping XP, a dangerous unsupported OS without security updates since 2014. If you really need Windows only software (or if you think you do but really don't which is way more likely) you need to install and use a supported Windows version and if it must be, also upgrade the hardware accordingly. Keeping Windows XP is a risk for you and everybody else if it accesses the internet even if only occasionally. By now, probably, your computer running XP is a bot, part of a large network controlled by people up to no good, wrecking havoc somewhere.

Lubuntu, on the other hand, either in its official repositories or via third party repositories, provides all the security updated software that conceivably runs in that old PC.

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My solution would be with LVM, create a slash partition with LVM and then add whatever you want on it to add storage, you could even add a SD card in your potential SDCard reader ;-) and then attach it as LVM to your Slash or whatever partition...

Here is an example. The point is:

  1. creating a LVM partition on your new attached device
  2. copy all data you've got on your slash partition (with a boot device can be USB/CD/DVD)
  3. Boot on this system (change fstab according to your new config)
  4. Format your old slash partition with LVM
  5. Add it to your LVM volume group
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    LVM works too, but the current root partition is not LVM, so as you did not describe how to convert this seems more a comment than an answer.
    – Panther
    Nov 1, 2017 at 1:12

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