I am looking for a laptop that will run Linux (Red Hat preferably) and has a HDD that can be removed and replaced easily with perhaps two screws or latches. I want to be able to switch HDD's and operating systems depending on my location without having to tear apart the laptop. I would prefer that it could run Vista Enterprise also. TIA!

Most laptop drives are relatively easy to replace.

One example is the Dell D520. Two screws on the bottom and the hard drive slides out in its own little caddy type thing.

My own laptop (Toshiba) is slightly more complex. One screw to remove the cd drive and the hd is hidden underneath, two more screws and out it pops.

I can only advise you get a USB Drive that has approximately at least 50 GB of space capacity. Tell Linux when you set it up that the partition for boot or the root partition of the drive is where the boot loader is. Mark the device as bootable and then set up Linux. The USB drive marked as bootable, with swap and all, can, if you need it to, be configured for other systems that you may plug it in to. of course the USB boot must be doable on your computer and the USB drive must be made bootable

I hope this helps; it is possible to use a USB drive to boot the system even if your computer hard drive has NO Linux partition whatsoever

I am sorry if this does not help

Hi

my laptop is an IBM t40. the hard drive slips out of the right side with a slight tug.
there is only one screw in the bottom that I leave out all the time. it only locks the
hard drive door in place. IBM is up to the t61 or so series now. you can find t40's or
t41's on ebay for around $500. I have two hard drives. one with win xp pro and the other
has Ubuntu 7.04. I dont use the win xp one very much at all now, but changing them out
is very easy.

Vanessa

HP NC6000 is quite easy. You can also very easily slide the CD player out and put a different HDD I am lead to believe.

Why don't you just make the machine dual boot, btw?