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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?

5 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. Swap HDs, Bootloaders by MBCook · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

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  3. Try Compaq M700 by stonebeat.org · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

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  4. 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.

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