Simple question before I even start with Linux
 

hey i just have one quick question.

I got a laptop for college, and i set all my stuff up on here. I ran Linux on my home computer a couple years ago and loved it. I want to now get back into it. But seeing as i am already settled on on my built in hard drive on my laptop, i dont want to reformat the built in harddrive. But i want to get linux up and running.

I was wondering if I could do that with an external hard drive?

Could I just use some boot software and when I choose Linux could I boot it off my external harddrive?

or you can get partition magic and resize your current windows partion to a smaller size and format the free space for linux :D

Hi, your hard-drive is not really built in. If you open up the right panel, you can swap out the hard-drive. Just letting ya know. But yea, I believe you can boot off linux in your external harddrive. I've never done that before so I can't tell you if that's possible or not but it should be possible. I have done dual-booting. It's simple, you have winxx running as your primary OS im assuming. Boot up your linux (whatever distro) and install it. Make sure it installs on the empty hard drive. Then you have a choice of your boot loader (lilo or Grub), either one is fine. After the install is complete and you reboot your system, your boot loader will load up and you will have a choice of choosing which OS you want to load up. Try that...

-twantrd

I am dualbooting mandrake linux and windows xp on my laptop. I have had no problems whatsoever. Just make space on your hard drive..even 2 gig should be enough.