dual boot using external hard drive?
 

Dear All,

Before buying a PC running Windows XP that has no room for an extra internal hard drive, I would like to confirm whether it would be possible to add an extrnal hard drive and make the machine dual boot, running XP on the internal drive and Linux on the external drive?

(The reason for running Linux on the external drive is so as not to violate warranty).

Baggy

Well it is possible.. just make sure Linux is able to detect ur external Hd..and every thing will be as normal as u r having both on internal drives

What kind of external drive are you considering?
USB, Firewire or SCSI?
Is your PC capable of booting from a USB device? What distro are you considering installing. Some will require changing the initrd to load the USB modules. Some require recompiling the kernel. Even if you have USB 2.0 it will still be slow compared to an internal hard drive.

I'm not sure about booting from firewire.

Is repartitioning the internal hard drive out of the question.

As another options would be a live CD version like Knoppix. Is repartitioning the internal hard drive for dual boot out of the question too?