[Lancaster] Question on external hard drives

[Ken Hough]

Hi Rik,

I agree with Wayne. This can be done. I have done it on a number of occasions 
with good results.

However, unless you really understand about partitioning of hard drives and 
about boot loaders, I suggest that you don't try it. There could be a risk 
that you end up totally screwing your existing system.

To begin with, you might consider using a spare computer (as suggested by 
Wayne). Alternatively, you could fit a plug-in hard drive caddy into your 
existing PC and get two hard drive cariers for this caddy. You could then fit 
your existing hard drive into one of these carriers and an extra hard drive 
into the other carrier.

I keep an old Athlon 1800XP box like this specifically for trying out stuff. 
No worries!

BTW: If you do want to do any hard drive partitioning, I can recommend 'System 
Rescue CD'. See:
<http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page>

This is a live Linux distro supplied as an ISO file for burning to CD, and 
includes 'gparted'.

'gparted' provides a good graphical impression of any partitioning job 
attempted. My only complaint ( ?  ;-) ) is that because of the thoroughness 
of the checks that it does, things can take a while to complete.

Regards

Ken hough

On Sunday 26 April 2009 12:54:56 Wayne Ward wrote:
> Hi rik yes this can be done but could make things a bit more of a
> headache for you
> I would try and keep your first install as straight forward as possible
> maybe a virtual machine would be easier using virtualbox maybe??..
> although a old spare computer would be the best way to be honest ;-)
>
> Regards
> Wayne
>
> Rik Boland wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I want to get started on Gento but I don't have another machine to
> > work with, nor do I want on, so is it all possible to use a external
> > hard drive in a caddy and to boot it up that way?
> >
> > I hope that makes sense and I hope you can.
> >
> > If you can how easy is it to do it?
> >
> > Shalom