External hard drive for an hp notebook

hugo.cesar.castillo · 12-11-2007, 04:00 PM

To whom it may concern.

I am new and I am in search for an external hard drive (more than 100Gb) that can I use it on my new laptop hp dv6000z series. I want to boot it from the bios and I plan to install ubuntu. Could you recomend me a brand of a non expensive,compatible external hard drive for my lap. I need space because I am in windows vista and I already do not have enough space on my hard drivel. Please help me to find a good non-expensive hard drive. Another question is on my bios I have this options, USB diskette on key, usb hard drive, notebook hard drive, usb floppy, network adapter, usb floppy. I suppose that I can use the bios option usb hard drive? Can I partition the new external hard drive being the default from the bios to use linux, and the other part to use XP to use it to backup some files and programs that I am interested to save. Please, if you have a link, I would appreciate it. Regards, and please I am new in this.
HCAC

jschiwal · 12-11-2007, 07:02 PM

Being that Linux will be running on an external drive, I would recommend using your boot selection shortcut key ([F3] on my HP laptop) to select the external drive to boot from.

I don't think Grub can recognize an external USB drive. So you don't want to modify the MBR on the Laptops internal drive.

For performance, if your laptop has an ieee1394 connection, get an external drive that can use it. USB 2.0 get's its performance by compressing the data before it goes on the line. In my experience, firewire drives have better performance.

hugo.cesar.castillo · 12-12-2007, 10:43 AM

Thank you for the hard drive. I have only other question, do you know what brands of external drives are compatible with ubunto? I want to be sure before I buy it.

Kahless · 12-12-2007, 07:10 PM

Brand should be of no relevance. They are all going to be seen by the kernel as SCSI devices, regardless of what they are.

Personally, I prefer to buy enclosures empty, then add my own drive. Its often cheaper, and guarantees an upgrade path should you decide you need a bigger drive.

If that should prove too technical, I have a friend who has a Western Digital drive that works well.