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.