yesterday i posted a question about adding a second hdd and just changing the bios whenever i wanted to use fc5 i have since thought of perhaps a better idea and am wondering if it would work

if i buy an external usb hdd and install fc5 to that then change the bios to usb booting before my hdd1 then couldnt i just plug in the usb drive then restart my computer whenever i wanted to use fc5. another question about this method is how would i disconnect the drive if i disconnected it before i shut down what would happen or could i just shut down, unplug and restart with hdd1 booting windows since nothing would be connected to usb. to be honest im not sure if i can even boot from a usb drive or not any answers are much apprecieated

Since the bios allows USB boot then you should be able to do this. Many post here on the subject and lots of help if certain things need to be configured. I think the issue with most distros is that you need to have USB and other requirements like scsi usage compiled into the kernel. This is not the default in Redhat and Redhat clones (Fedora, Centos) distros precompiled rpm kernels. Again not 100percent sure but you will need to recompile the kernel and make USB and others in the kernel versuses as modules which is the default. Let us know how it goes.

Brian1