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

*scratches head*

[TheSHAD0W]

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.

Swap HDs, Bootloaders

[MBCook]

Two suggestions. First of all, many laptops make it easy to swap drives, or at swap a second one in and out, so you could use that or a external drive.

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.