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Laptops that Boot From External Drives?
ducman asks: "I'm a consultant and carry two laptops. I have to assume that my employer can see everything I do and access every file I store on the machine they provided me with. But I'm tired of hauling two laptops (and power supplies, etc) everywhere I go. My personal machine is an Apple TiBook, which will boot off an external, firewire drive. Could I do the same thing with an Intel laptop and run Linux on it for personal stuff? Am I the only one with this problem?" Which Intel-based laptop, that supports booting from an external drive, would you recommend?
That being said, unless your company consists of facists, or you are using the laptop for, um, illicit purposes, I don't really see what the problem is. Just *never* store anything personal on your corporate laptop and you should be ok.
Wouldn't it be possible to boot from a CD and then use some rewritable media for /home , like a floppy or zip drive if it is available ?
So they can access everything you put on their hardware. Well, you're only working on their hardware during the hours your billing for, and therefore you're only doing work that in the end belongs to them anyway.
I understand a request for privacy, but I don't understand what keystrokes you are concerned they'll catch.
Second, and if your laptop doesn't support external booting, just load up a minimal install and mount the drive as root, or pivot_root it or something. Should be easy nuff to set up.
Does this mean your employer will buy any laptop machine you wish, for your use? And you want this information so you can recommend which one he should get? If you have to foot the bill for your own machine, you ought to be able to tell your employer to fuck off if he wants to examine the contents.
Or are you afraid some piece of proprietary company software contains spy tools, letting the IS department observe your doings? Yeah, I can see where that would be a problem.
You might have more luck with a generic brand notebook PC than with one of the name brands. Companies like Dell and Sony tend to rip some of the features out of the system BIOSes to keep people from screwing them up and then calling for help. A good generic laptop would probably have a default BIOS with all the features therein intact.
tried booting Knoppix off of a cd-rom and mounting your external storage from there?
Knoppix is a full featured linux system on a bootable cd-rom that does not require any writable storage (but can use it if you've got it).
So how do you boot the drive? Well, you have a few options. If the drive is internal (like the second drive, since booting the 1st is easy) you could put a bootloader (GRUB, LILO, etc) on the main drive. Your second option is that you can use programs (I think that one is called loadlin) that let you load Linux from windows. You just pass it a kernel and initrd if needed, etc and you can boot. So if you just built firewire, firewire HDs, and such into the kernel, you should be able to use a firewire drive as your Linux drive (initrd should make this easier). This way even if the BIOS won't let you boot a firewire drive, you can still do it.
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I use Compaq M700 for this purpose. It supports swapable drives, plus booting from secondary HD, which can placed in the CD ROM bay. M700 works out very nicely. I even bought a M700 for home, so now I just need to take the HD with me, and not lug the whole laptop with me.
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By the way, did you know that your apple laptop can be turned into a dumb firewire drive by holding down the 'T' key when booting?
It will boot up and show a big firewire logo on the screen, and then if you plug it into a second apple, the other system will mount the first machine's hard disk. (kind of a security problem actually)
I wonder if you could put a windows partition on the apple's hard disk and access it with the intel laptop...
Love their hardware. I bring a mod-bay drive with me that belongs to me, and hit F12 at boot time. It pulls up a boot menu, and I am home free.
Getting Linux to run on a laptop-somebody-else-bought is easier said than done. I have been wrestling with a Compaq Presario 1200 for months now, the thing has a bridged Tulip network card that has reverse-IRQ priorities, the experimental kernels will run on the box but a distro e.g. Redhat 8 hangs on kudzu the 2nd time the sucker tries to boot. And I can't get the experimental kernel to compile properly under Redhat 8. Back to drawing board Natasha.
I'm a contractor too. My old solution to your problem was to lug my laptop to work every day. Ugh. Eventually I gave up on this, formatted my desktop and installed my own copy of win2k at work. Now all I carry back and forth is a Pockey 20gig USB2.0 HD. This works for me. Keep in mind that some places will fire you for messing with their hardware, but they are just going to re-image my desktop when I move on anyway.
FYI - I use SSH to tunnel to a personal linux box from the work desktop and tunnel all my POP, SMTP, HTTP, and IM communications to keep everything private.
A lot of people so far have answered:
1. Buy a laptop with a swappable drive bay; or
2. You shouldn't want to boot from an external drive. Nothing to see here folks, move on.
Someone else mentioned using a CD based Linux distro like Knoppix or DemoLinux and then mounting the external storage after that. That would work, but would be a huge pain in the ass if you wanted to do much more than experiment superficially.
Need to upgrade the kernel? Figure out what kinds of changes throughout the CD you'd have to make (special cases due to being on a CD) and then put the kernel on there. Upgrade a package that's on the CD? Have to get another machine to copy the image of the CD to, install the RPM/DEB/TGZ then figure out how to make a new CD. Not incredibly impossible for a Linux guru, but definately not something approachable for a relative newbie whenever she wants to install a package that already exists on the CD.
Again- not impossible, but a bit daunting. Sure would be a lot easier if the PC hardware was as well designed as the Mac counterparts.
About the booting via a bootloader like lilo or
GRUB:
How possible is that? Do any of these bootloaders have drivers for USB, USB2 or FireWire? One of the really cool things about Mac hardware is OpenFirmware, which makes possible booting off of the network (no matter if your card explicitly supports it in its own ROM or not), USBx, FireWire or SCSI.
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It sucks, but that really is the only way to handdle more than a handful of desktops. The best situation had different rules for the data center staff. IT handled everything for both the ordinary users, and the developers. Those of us that built and maintained the data center were allowed more lattitude in what we could use, in exchange for never bothering the MCSE's. That was a sacrifice I could live with.
I once booted a Toshiba Tecra laptop from a UW disk in an external enclosure (Pizzabox Sun workstation style) via a CardBus SCSI adapter.
Also, many higher-end "business" laptops allow you to boot from
If you are running Windows 2000 or XP on the laptop, consider running a VMWare virtual machine on an encrypted directory. It would be probaly be slow, but an admin would have to actually log in as your user to do anything with the virtual machine.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Just run User-mode Linux or VMWare, according to what OSes you want to boot natively and from the removable drive. They will happily boot off any medium you can plug in.
Or, better, just put your private data in an encrypted file system, and unmount it when your employer might get to it. It doesn't even need its own partition, it can be in a regular file. Of course this assumes you're running Linux or a BSD, but you can run VMWare under that to load any cheesy employer-favored OS.
You probably also have a super shitty VIA USB controller also. Make sure that it is not enabled on boot.
IBM Laptops, specifically the T-Series, have a removeable side bay that holds any standard laptop Hard Drive. I use that with 2 spare drives in my bag to boot between my 3 OSes - Win2k System Image for work, WinXP System for Fun on the Road, and Linux for whatever.
What about just installing and booting a Linux Dist. for the PPC arch?
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Anyone know how the PC bios normally handles its discussions with a firewire drive that it is booting? I don't know about firewire, this machine didn't come with it, but it says it'll boot from USB. I haven't got around to making a bootable zip disk to test that yet.
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