Slashdot Mirror


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?

3 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. boot Knoppix off a cd-rom by Splork · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

  2. interesting fact... by Polo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

    1. Re:interesting fact... by Johnny+Mnemonic · · Score: 5, Informative


      kind of a security problem actually

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

      --

      --
      $tar -xvf .sig.tar