[vox-tech] booting off an external hard drive

[Geoffrey Herteg]

If memory serves (which often it doesn't, at least not 100%!), you probably
modify one of the PCMCIA boot disks provided by Debian or RedHat for this.
If your laptop doesn't have a floppy drive (don't laugh, my T20 doesn't!),
you could probably burn an El Torito CDR boot disk with the custom image.  

Just make sure the disk uses a cramfs initial ramdisk to load a temporary
root into memory, load any support modules you need (like PCMCIA support,
SCSI or firewire modules, etc), run any required initialization scripts, and
then chroot to the drive you wish to use as your real root.  I think things
should proceed normally from there.

It's a complicated process to be sure, but http://www.tldp.org/ (Linux
Documentation Project) has an entry in the PCMCIA Howto about it
(http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/PCMCIA-HOWTO-5.html).

Good luck!

- Geoffrey

On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 10:29:52AM -0800, Jennifer Stickel wrote:
> 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?
> 
> Jennifer
> 
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