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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?
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 ?
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.
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).
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.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
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...
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.
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.