Boot from external drive?

[tcadieux]

I receieved a laptop from work that is so locked down, all i can do is use Word. I wanted to actually be able to use this thing, so I thought i would buy a Palm size HD, install an OS on it, then boot from FDD in the bios, has anyone ever tried this?

[ghell]

Uh, I've booted from a 2.5" external hard drive via usb on a machine that supports booting from usb (old machines probably dont) if that helps.

[tcadieux]

My bios only has these options

HD
FDD
CD/DVD
LAN

[ghell]

Then I doubt you would be able to boot from an external drive, though you may be able to emulate the usb drive as one of those (my bios lets me select to load from a compact flash card in a usb card reader as if it were a HDD/FDD/CDD for example, but then again my bios also lets me just boot off usb anyway =P)

I once had a laptop that didn't support usb booting and wanted to boot linux off it, so ended up using the internal drive's mbr to load grub for ntloader (probably works with standard grub too, I was keeping windows xp on the internal drive so kept the ntloader on there), and one of the options i put in grub was to boot linux (i expect it would work with windows) off the external drive. Having the boot run off the mbr of the internal drive also let me load the internal drive even when the external wasn't plugged in (it just complained at me within grub when I selected to load root(1,0) and there was no 2nd drive)