I have a IDE hard drive spare and I want to get an external enclosure I can put it in, load a Linux distro on it and then connect the enclosure to various PCs via USB (some USB 1 and some USB 2). I will then boot from USB or if the BIOS won't allow this (apparently some won't allow USB booting) I will take the HD from the enclosure and put it in a bay (if the PC I am using has bays that IDE HDs can be slid into). I can then Linux to my hearts content almost anywhere without any risk of mucking up the PC I am using.
I want to find an enclosure of this type that is Linux compatible. Any suggestions?

You are probably better off with a livecd and a pendrive for a persistent /home. Some livcds let you do what you want re installing on a usb hard drive and having a portable linux distro. However, an ordinary distro won't work so good for you if at all. The problem is you are going to have different hardware environments on all these PCs and a standard distro like suse, fedora, ubuntu, mandriva, etc, isn't designed to gracefully adapt to rapidily changing hardware environments; livecds are.

At any rate, usb hard drive enclosures should all work well under linux and are generally detected as usb mass storage devices. I've used several with no problems but I recommend Apricorn enclosures as my favorites:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817155601

They have an internal cooling fan which you really need if you are going to have the drive on for long periods of time. The cheaper passively cooled ones are OK for occaisional backups but they tend to fry hard drives if left on. Appricorns also come with an oem version of Acronis True Image which is very nice disk imaging software and linux friendly.

I would say any one of those adapter cases chould work fine. Have used a few without an issue.

For non usb bios boots check out this site. http://featherlinux.berlios.de/download.htm

Things to make sure is for X use like vesa. Slow but generic to most all video cards. This is where you can run into issues. Many Live CD to a detect and configure X on the fly.
Also keep resolution to say 800x600. You can change as needed if you now the systems limits.

Brian

This sounds like a good idea. Can you recommend a particluar LiveCD? I guess when you boot from the LiveCD you then have a running Linux session and you can then access the pendrive, format it, create a /home directory on it and then save files to it. Have I got this correct?
Could you also create say a /usr directory on the pendrive and add applications there for use by the Linux OS running off the Live CD?

Yes you can do that with them. Once the system is up you can have a partition created on a pendrive. Copy the contents of /home to the new partition, Rename current /home from the Live cd boot to say /home2, then mount the pen partition as /home.

There are sites that discuss this with knoppix live cd. Also there is a book called Hacking Knoppix from Orielly and discusses many things you can do with knoppix.

There are many of them out there. http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=cd

Brian

I ended up creating a Puppy Linux Live CD and using it in combination with a USB pendrive. Works great and very simple to use, the OS does it all for the user with minimal manual configuration. I am very impressed by this distro. Thanks very much for sending down this path. I won't be needing that HD and enclosure, such a setup wouldn't have done what I wanted anyway it seems.