i was wondering if anybody knew how to dual boot kubuntu on to a external hard drive with vista on the regular hard drive

You should be able to find any number of answers to that question by using the search function here at LQ or by googling it.

If you are familiar with partitioning and the way drives are named in Linux and have some understanding of bootloaders (Grub in particular) it should be pretty simple. You need to know which drive has vista before you do the install so you don't overwrite it.

well the hard drive in the laptop is the one with vista. what i want to do is put linux on my external hard drive and have it dual boot that way. The external is 1tb so space is obviously not an issue, and it has a ntfs filing system. I know with vista you can shrink the filing system. So im gonna try, if i can, shrink the external hard drive and put the kubuntu partition for the unused space. I guess afterwards i'll have to make another partition of fat to share stuff. But right now im just worried about making it dual boot.