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Installation - help with install/booting from usb drive

w1av - 06.09.2006, 14:07 Uhr
Titel: help with install/booting from usb drive

Hello. I am thinking about getting a new LAPTOP and the one problem I have seen is the HARD DRIVES are almost impossible to get at. I narrowed my choices down to either an HP or SONY vaio. Medium priced ones, around $1200-$1300.
My current laptop is a 4 year old HP Pavilion which is dual boot, win/kanotix. The hdd was easy to get to so I just replaced it with a bigger one and put my dual boot system on it.
The problem is newer laptops bury the hdd where you cant get at them easily. Plus, they dont come with original WINxp installation disks. You restore from a hidden partition. Anyway my only option is to look into getting one of those 80Gig external usb drives.
But there are many variables. I will have to see if the laptop I want will let me boot from an external usb drive. If so, I want to install Kanotix on the external drive. My main concern is how much of a hassle is it to do this?
I plan to use the entire drive for Kanotix. Is it as simple as a regular HDD installation? I want a full regular installation just like if it was on the HDD.
I want a newer laptop but also I want/need my Kanotix too! I still need WinXP for some things on occasion.
I dont want to do something similar to booting from a usb stick, which I tried with Feather Linux, because it is not a real installation. It just copies the same stuff off the CD and it is the same as booting from the live CD.
And I had to mess with some crazy boot loader program.
If anyone can help I would appreciate it! Sehr glücklich

slam - 06.09.2006, 14:37 Uhr
Titel: RE: help with install/booting from usb drive

1) Stick with HP, or - even better IBM. Forget Sony.
2) Dual boot on the same HDD is no problem with hidden recovery partitions - they are only hidden for Windows Winken

. You simply use the GParted Live CD to shrink the existing Windows partition, leave the recovery partition as it is, and add a Linux & a swap partition into the new gained free space. http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gparted/gparted-livecd-0.3-1.iso. After that grab the most recent Kanotix and install.
3) Although you don't need an external extra drive to run Linux, it is a very practical thing to have anyway. For example you may do very easy backups there.
Greetings,
Chris

w1av - 06.09.2006, 15:00 Uhr
Titel: usb drive

Thanks for the advise Slam....it sounds kind of scary though! I would think that doing this should be the FIRST thing I should do before I use laptop for anything. If I hose the system, I can just restore. But it seems simple enough. But can I still do a regular complete install of Kanotix on a usb external drive? I know I would have to edit menu.lst to have a menu choice to be able to boot up Kanotix from the usb drive. I think external usb drives are called "sda1". My usb pen drive is sda1.