[ltp] Booting T40p from USB HD or USB CD/DVD

[Joel Ebel]

Yes.  It is possible to boot off of a USB hard drive, or any other USB 
storage device such as a memory key.  There is one problem, which I have 
trie dot get IBM to fix though.  If you ever boot the computer without 
the USB storage device plugged in, then it removes it from the boot 
order, and the next time you want to boot from it, you have to go in the 
BIOS, and change the boot order to boot from USB before the internal 
HDD.  I was told by IBm that they would get that message to the 
engineers that code the BIOS, but I'm guessing it never made it.  It's 
really hard to communicate with the actual engineers.  oh well.  Another 
option is to have a loader set up that knows what to do with the USB 
drive.  You could boot off of a floppy (requiring of course that you 
plug in a USB floppy drive), a cd-rom with a floppy image, or you could 
set up lilo/grub on the primary HDD to boot off of USB as an option. 
For some info on this, check out my distribution, RUNT Linux. 
http://www.ncsu.edu/resnet/runt.  It is Linux designed to run off of a 
128 MB USB pen drive.  It has a floppy image that you can boot with to 
boot USB if you can't do it directly.  Obviously you are interested in a 
large distribution on a hard drive rather than just a pen drive, but you 
may find some of the theory behind it useful.

Joel

Pio Bättig wrote:
> Dear Linux/t40p users
> 
> I would like to ask you whether it is possible to install and boot the t40p
> under linux (RedHat 9) from an USB(2) attached Harddisk drive.
> 
> The other possibility would be to remove the internal CDRW/DVD drive,
> install a second HD in the notebook and to attach a CDRW/DVD drive via
> USB(2).
> 
> The first possibility would be the cheaper  one, I've seen some USB HD's on
> sale, an external CD-drive plus a 2.5" HD would cost quite a lot of
> money....
> 
> Unfortunately, I need the space I have on my my windows partition, so I
> can't just divide it and install linux on a second partition on the first
> hd.
> 
> I already googled, but by now I found nothing helpful.
> 
> Thank you very much in advance for your answers
> 
> Best Regards
> 
> Pio
>