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?

Comments

boot Knoppix off a cd-rom

[Splork]

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).

Try Compaq M700

[stonebeat.org]

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.

interesting fact...

[Polo]

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...

Re:interesting fact...

[Johnny Mnemonic]

kind of a security problem actually

You can disable this ability with Apple's Open Firmware lock.

Dell Is the Way

[gwynnebaer]

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.

Can it be done?

[RevAaron]

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.