Andrew Farnsworth wrote: > Unfortunately, by doing it my way you will not be able to just install the > external hard drive internal to the laptop and boot it.
Being able to boot the "now formerly external" drive in the new laptop is definitely one of my objectives. > Also, you may find > that the laptop you buy won't support your external as an internal. Some > laptop makers, especially of small laptops have gone to 1.6 (1.8?) inch > drives and you will probably buy a 2.5 inch drive. I'm looking at a Latitude E6500, so I don't expect that to be a problem. > Good luck and let us know how it goes. OK, here's a quickie update: I think I've got it basically set up to do what I want. :-) Random thoughts and details... I bought a Seagate 500GB 7200 rpm SATA drive ($139.99), and a Rocketfish external enclosure ($69.99) from Best Buy. Sure, I could have spent less elsewhere, but I'd have still had to pay shipping and wait for it to arrive. The drive has been fine (no clicking, yay!), and I'm glad I opted for this enclosure instead of a cheaper one. This one included a power supply, which I later found out would be necessary if I ever wanted to use that enclosure with the eSATA cable. (USB 2 provides power, eSATA does not). My biggest issues were partitioning and getting the bootloader installed. Once I got the partitions where I wanted and gave up on just copying my existing install to the new drive (now I know it was a naive idea) and installed Mandriva 2009 from scratch, I was able to move on to the usual installation issues. E.g., getting the Broadcom-based wireless card working, which was accomplished with ndiswrapper. Oops, almost forgot to mention that KDE wouldn't work at first, probably due to my attempts to "just copy" the existing install. Luckily, I was able to use XFCE to install all the needed packages and now KDE is working. That's something I really love about Linux... if (more like "when") I screw up KDE, I can still use XFCE, Gnome, IceWM, etc., or even the command line, to access the system and hopefully fix things. The current status is that the laptop boots into Windows Vista as usual unless I connect the external drive via USB. When the drive is plugged in, I get GRUB offering boot options for that drive, which currently is only Mandriva 2009. I expected performance to take a hit due to the possibility of USB being a bottleneck. However, so far, I haven't had any issues with lag. I'll try to play Sauerbraten from the external drive later today to see if there's any lag due to the USB bus speed. Still to do: 1) buy a new laptop 2) install the currently external hard drive 3) install Windows 4) re-install GRUB 5) ...? 6) Profit! I'm still interested in imaging my "old" Linux and WinXP installs, and running them via VMware, etc. But I'll probably wait until I've got the new laptop squared away before attempting that. Let me know if you have questions, I'm happy to share what little I've learned here. And thanks again for everyone's thoughts and suggestions! JMJ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
