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Laptops that Boot From External Drives?

Posted by Cliff on from the flexible-hardware dept.

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?

2 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. CD + Floppy by Tolchz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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 ?

  2. My bonehead solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.