boot from external HD

[hobey19]

i have an external HD (40gb) that i would like to install a couple of distros on (ubuntu and fc4 for now). i have two computers that support boot from USB, so if possible, i would like both to be able to use this, as one is more of a server and is restarted very infrequently. i gave it a whirl once with ubuntu, but i got a bootloader error. i thought, that since i was telling the mobo to boot from USB, it would ignore my other hard drives when booting. after doing fixmbr, everything was fine, so i know it did something with ntldr. what do i have to do to keep this independent of the computer its on?

thanks

craig

[kilgoretrout]

It's possible to do but is certainly nothing for an inexperienced linux user to try. You quickly get your self into a catch-22 - in order to see the usb/firewire hard drive linux needs the driver modules for these devices and these modules are on the root partition on the external hard drive. Here's an article describing what needs to be done:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...nxw02aFireBoot

If that doesn't scare you off, go ahead and try it but you'll probably have to adapt some of the stuff for the 2.6 kernels in use in most modern distros as the article references some stuff specific to 2.4 kernels(devfs) which has been replaced by "udev" in the 2.6 kernels(see scripts at end of article).

[hobey19]

yea, that kind of is beyond me. thanks for the input. i am a newb to linux, and i am trying not to install it to any of my computers if i can help it, but i would like to use something a little faster than a Live CD. i guess i will have to break down and partition. thanks for your help

craig