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I have a friend that wants to start playing with Linux. Naturally, they
do not want to disturb their Windows partition to do so, and it's a
laptop, so that's the end of that, pretty quickly.

However, he has a 250GB IDE drive in a IDE-to-USB housing that works
pretty well, and the laptop recognizes it as a device that can be booted
from. I'm still waiting on Slackware to download at home before I make
any more attempts at installing anything on it, but I know that RH and
Xandros (both systems I "won" at a local LUG meeting, but haven't yet
found a good home for) refuse to see /dev/sda even though the kernel
sees it just fine. They will only install to /dev/hda - at least,
that's the only option that their installers are giving me.

I half expect the same behavior in Slackware's case, since it will find
that the system itself is IDE based, before trying to find any other
drives. In any case, I was thinking, take the drive out of the housing
and install it in a desktop machine, install Linux on it, and with the
bootloader and all (since no boot loader that I know of, can communicate
with USB drives, it'd be pointless to put it on the Hard disk of the
laptop), and then just tell the laptop to boot off of that after I put
it back.

The only problem is this: I'm not exactly sure how one would go about
setting it up to actually boot from a USB drive - the Laptop can talk to
the drive to get it to boot, but what kind of hoops am I going to need
to jump through to get it to successfully boot the Linux system and get
it running, after the drive is placed back on the USB bus? Do I merely
place a USB / SCSI enabled kernel into an initrd? In theory, I would
think it'd be sorta simple like that, but I'm not entirely sure... so,
here I am.

Anyone have any ideas before I jump into this? It'll (obviously) be my
first time installing a distribution of Linux to run from a USB drive,
but it seems like it should work.

Thanks!

Mike

- --
Michael B. Trausch <fd0man+spam@gmail.com>
Website: http://fd0man.chadeux.net/spm Jabber: mtrausch@jabber.com
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