[vox-tech] booting off an external hard drive

[Corey A.Hines]

Thanks for the advice on replying to a post on vox-tech. I will read 
over the FAQs and try agian. Your response to the post pretty much 
covers what I was going to tell her. In fact Redhat installer will see 
USB drives and allow you to install on them so a small partition and a 
bootloader on the internal drive should do the trick. She may need a 
driver in an initrd as well. That was what I was going to post but I 
will refrain since it is probably redundant at this point. Thanks again 
for the response.

-Corey A. Hines

On Friday, February 28, 2003, at 12:48  PM, Mike Simons wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 10:42:07AM -0800, ME wrote:
>> Jennifer Stickel said:
>>> 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?
>>
>> 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.
>
>   I second ME, it's upto the BIOS what devices are bootable...
>
>>> 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?
>>
>> 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.
>
>   While ME seems to be talking about building a special floppy or
> CD disk here, there is no reason this disk couldn't actually be a
> very small partition on your hard drive which you mentioned above.
> It would reduce the hassle of damaging or losing a removable disk.
>   Depending on how complex you want to make things the partition could
> be as small as 2 or 4 megs.  Something in the 20-40 Meg range would be
> less complex... but if you have a hundred megs or so of space to spare
> you could have the root partition on your internal hard drive, and
> have /usr /var /home, mounted off the external device... this would
> be very simple.
>
>     TTFN,
>       Mike
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Corey A. Hines
www.theblizz.com