Re: external hard drive -- linux

jfwfor_at_aftrgv.com
Date: 08/20/04 

Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 07:42:37 GMT

|at walmart they have seagate external drives.

Plugs into the USB port?

|so i was thinking i could get a external drive at
|walmart. then let yast erase it (because it will
|probably be ntfs) and then install linux to external
|drive. the reason i think this is yast identifies
|the drive and allows me to select it with a check
|box.

Should be doable, provided you load the USB support modules before the
install.

|will i have problems with a dual boot system doing
|it this way? my internal drive has windows and external
|will have linux.

The main problem is booting a kernel that has the USB support. If your
BIOS doesn't boot off USB, then you have a chicken and egg situation.
The ways are resolving it are: use a floppy; use a CDROM; boot from
Windows (used to be possible with loadlin, probably not anymore with
protected mode OSes like NT and XP). If you could even wrangle a small
partition on the primary you could put a bootloader and a boot partition
there.

There was a tutorial recently on how to boot and mount a USB disk. Might
have been linked to from linuxtoday.com, but not sure. 

--

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