[vox-tech] booting off an external hard drive

[Corey A.Hines]

Jennifer,

Your second idea is most likely the easiest. Redhat installer will see 
an external drive. I have a USB 2.0 external drive and the installer 
will allow me to install to that drive. However, due to BIOS support it 
will not boot off a USB 2.0 drive. If you install the bootloader on the 
internal hard drive that may be all you need to do. Or, you could make 
the /boot partition on the internal hard drive and all other partitions 
on the external and install the bootloader on the internal hard drive. 
The only other thing you may need to do is use the initrd (initial 
ramdisk) in your kernel config to load the USB driver. Otherwise it may 
not know how to access the USB drive. This is the type of thing you 
need to do to boot off a SCSI device under some configurations and 
external USB devices use SCSI emulation so it may not be too difficult. 
I hope this helps, I have never tried it myself but it seems very 
doable. Let me know how things work.

-Corey A. Hines

On Friday, February 28, 2003, at 10:29  AM, 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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Corey A. Hines
www.theblizz.com