I know people have to extra work when booting a standard distro installed in an external disk but I haven't gone into it myself because I can't fill up the empty partitions of my 4 internal disks after installing more than 100 systems.

An internal hard disk can transfer data at a much higher speed and the performance of a Linux in an external disk is likely to suffer significantly.

To overcome the problems of booting to an external disk there seems to be a few options available like (a) Keep the kernel in an internal disk, (b) specially rig the ram disk for USB application or (c)slow down the booting process using a boot loader designed for floppy etc.

I can't offer any more help until I start looking into this area.

Just curious why would you need a ramdisk for a usbmemory stick? Isn't it just like a hard drive?

Dave

The problem mentioned above is for ecternal hard disks. Memory sticks or flash drives are easier to accept distros but you still need special versions for them. I believe it is to do with the kernel not finding all the necessary response in the boot up process because of the slow USB transmission rate. Many USB memory sticks still use a single Fat16 partition and cannot be subdivided by many distros during installation so they are restricted hard disks.