Laptops that Boot From External Drives? 42
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?
Simple. (Score:2, Insightful)
That being said, unless your company consists of facists, or you are using the laptop for, um, illicit purposes, I don't really see what the problem is. Just *never* store anything personal on your corporate laptop and you should be ok.
Why does this make you scared? (Score:2, Insightful)
I understand a request for privacy, but I don't understand what keystrokes you are concerned they'll catch.
Second, and if your laptop doesn't support external booting, just load up a minimal install and mount the drive as root, or pivot_root it or something. Should be easy nuff to set up.
*scratches head* (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Swap HDs, Bootloaders (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Simple. (Score:2, Insightful)
This shouldn't be too difficult. The easiest immediate solution is to use a boot CD to boot the firewire/usb drive. Shouldn't be hard since he plans to use Linux. Even simpler, you could even use something like the Knoppix live CD and then use the external drive just to store data (mpegs of wife stripping or whatever).
I can't say I know of any laptops that can boot directly to a firewire/usb drive, but I would be interested in this as well.