dual boot: linux inside, XP in external USB?

I am using Suse 9.1 with an AMD 2500, 512 mb RAM. I inherited a 2.5" laptop drive with XP that I was thinking I could put into an external USB case, make bootable through the bios, turn it on and use it for XP chores on the rare occasions I need an XP session.

Is this workable?

The bios way will definitely work - just make sure your linux drive is unplugged as windows has a habit of automatically starting installs to IDE drives. You will also need a driver floppy disk to put in (press f6 on booting of windows install cd) then it all should work


you should be able to configure grub to see the usb drive as just another hard drive. This will let you boot your windows hard drive by selecting it from the grub menu on startup. This way though, you will need to get the drive going in the external adapter first before you can test it - you need to see what kind of device linux assigns the hardware to (/dev/sda) or something like that most likely. Once you have this, you can add an entry to grub (via yast) to boot /dev/sda - image type other and add chainloader +1 to the pre boot commands aswell and all should work.

thanks ! rasta

I cannot get Suse [ 9.1] to see the drive. I was succesful as root early on to get the drive to be recognized -- it's a Toshiba 30GB 2.5" HD from a dead lap top -- but subsequently it hasn't shown up. I assigned a mount point of /dev/sda using

mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /dev/sda -o rw,umask=0

and I even copied a file to it. But now the same command as root says it is not a valid device.

The tail on dmesg looks like the following -- it's a mess and goes through address 63 before it finally times out.

All i'm trying to do is use this for an occasional Windows session with WinXP that is already installed. Any suggestions? ### thanks

drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c: v2.0:USB HID core driver
usb 4-3: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-3: device not accepting address 6, error -110
usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using address 7
usb 4-3: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-3: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-3: device not accepting address 7, error -110
usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using address 8
usb 4-3: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-3: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-3: device not accepting address 8, error -110
usb 4-3: new high speed USB device using address 9
usb 4-3: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-3: control timeout on ep0out
usb 4-3: device not accepting address 9, error -110

I should add that I had to jumper the drive to get it recognized -- I made it a slave through cable select. Previously, it was unjumpered and that made it a master. ## rasta

May I contribute that I've heard rumors, and I would be pretty sure they're true, that if Bill is going to be alloted any space on your computer, he wants to be in the first place... You can partition the hell out of the rest of the disk and put yer Linux boot anywhere, Linux don't care... However, Bill insists upon first place... Your choice, that is, if you're sure you absolutely *need* to share...

If that is true -- and I don't doubt for a moment it's plausible -- it should have worked before when it was an unjumpered master. Surely someone out there is running WinXP from an external drive attached to their Linux box ...

## rasta