I'm interested in buying a USB hard drive for my laptop so that I can run Linux on a separate drive--I have heard that dual boot on the same drive is problematic and furthermore I would have problems freeing up the space.

My BIOS has an option to boot to a USB-FDD, but not USB-HDD, so my questions are the following:

1) Does anybody know if there is a USB hard drive (_not_ a thumb drive) that can be booted using the USB-FDD BIOS option?

2) Otherwise, can I use a boot disk to load whatever pieces of Linux are necessary for USB into memory and just continue from there with the USB drive? If so, how do I set this up?

3) If #2 is possible, am I restricted to a distro like Knoppix?

Thanks a lot for your help.

check to see if there is a bios upgrade for your laptop that will enable booting from usb drives i am a newbie so i dont know heaps but i booted mandrake 10.1 onto a usb hdd because i didnt want to split my little 40gb internal thats already half full. you will be restricted to distros with a boot kernel that can recognize usb hdd frdora 3 cant but i am told 4 can. something else u will have to over come is my pc will now only boot if the ext drive is connected. i was told by a mate i should have created the boot partition on the int hdd but i havent had a chance 2 test that.