[vox-tech] booting off an external hard drive

[ME]

Jennifer Stickel said:
> I have a laptop that is a few years old and only has a 10GB hard drive
> that is almost full.  I would like to increase that and be able to dual
> boot my computer.  Right now I am using Windows XPpro and have RH8.0
> installed on a desktop.  I was wondering if anyone knows if you can boot
> off an external hard drive either connected via the firewire or through
> a SCSI card in a PCMCIA card slot?  If not, is it possible to just have
> a "skeleton" of Linux on the internal hard drive and have most of the
> programs and files on the external one?

For the most part, choice of boot devices is controlled by the BIOS. I
have seen laptops that support booting from PCMCIA devices, a NIC, HD,
floppy, CD-ROM, zip disk, etc.

Often you can examine the BIOS settings by entering setup on your machine.
(Somes ESC, or F1 or F2 or DELETE or INSERT - sometimes you can for going
into setup by pressing keys on the keyboard during POST or disconnecting
the keyboard before POST.)

>From there, you may often find options for "Boot Order" or "boot devices"
and these are devices supported by your system BIOS. Some machine's
firmware can be software updated, and newer updates sometimes offer more
boot devices.

There are special devices that can e plugged into a slot on your system
that register themselves as a bootable device in ranges of memory that
would otherwise be used by a boot device the BIOS might support. One
example is a NIC with a slot for EPROM and net booting.

Beyond the above, you may be able to create a special boot disk that loads
a kernel with args and driver support for an extra device, such that after
the kernel is loaded, it is able to mount an external device as its root -
effectivley permitting you to do a two-step boot into a device not
supported in BIOS as a boot device. Of course this means using that
specially created disk (or whatever) when you want to boot the system to
the unsupported device.

-ME




-- 
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS/CM$/IT$/LS$/S/O$ !d--(++) !s !a+++(-----) C++$(++++) U++++$(+$) P+$>+++
L+++$(++) E W+++$(+) N+ o K w+$>++>+++ O-@ M+$ V-$>- !PS !PE Y+ PGP++
t@-(++) 5+@ X@ R- tv- b++ DI+++ D+ G--@ e+>++>++++ h(++)>+ r*>? z?
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
decode: http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/ about: http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html