OS on External

[M1ND.G4M3]

I am a devout Windoesnt hater, I cant stand any of their Release Versions at all.

I prefer things like Gentoo, Or Slackware. Recently (5 months ago lol) My laptop motherboard fried and i am yet to replace it (Im poor lol). Well, Ive been using my parents computer with Windows XP for a while, its driving me up the wall!

The hard drive is a bloody 12 gig and i need to get a new hard drive to store my music anyways, Does anyone know If I can install An operating system to an external hard drive and boot to it?

On this particular computer the boot options are "Hard Drive, Floppy, CD, Removable Devices" in no particular order So if it were possible Id assume i just make the bios boot to removable devices first, right?


I dont know, Its all hypothesis right now lol, Havent tried it anyone think itll work?

 

[x0r515t]

Yes you can dual-boot OS's on different HD's. If this is your current boot sequence:

"Hard Drive, Floppy, CD, Removable Devices"

You won't be able to boot off any device other than your hard drive, since it's first in line. To change the boot order, simply go into your BIOS. You can keep winXP on the 12gig HD. All you would have to do is install your new HD then once installed, install Linux on that. Once Linux is installed on HD2 you will simply need to install/configure a boot loader such as lilo or grub. Once your done, every time you start your PC you will see a boot menu asking you what OS you want to boot.

**EDIT** oops I just noticed you wanted to boot from an external hard drive, read here:
http://www.computerforum.com/archive/topic.php/15181-1.html
I would just get an internal.

 

[M1ND.G4M3]

Lol missed the point of my topic did you? but yeah, Its my parents computer, I just took it over, They dont let anyone touch the insides (Thing was made in 97, like itd matter if it crashed anyways) lol

Thanks for the link *goes to read*