[nmglug] Questions About Dual Booting From A USB Drive

[Tim Emerick]

The Linux piece sounds pretty easy.  I would suggest just installing a
Knoppix based distro as that will detect the different hardware settings and
adjust accordingly.

Windows XP is a little more difficult because the key is based on hardware
installed on the individual machine.  You could need as many as 3 separate
installations of WinXP (one for each PC)...that's assuming you're doing
everything legit.

The data partition I would definitely do Fat32.  That will offer the most
interoperability between the linux os and the windows os.

Good luck!  Sounds like a heck of a project.

--- "William D. Nystrom" <wdn at lanl.gov> wrote:
> I've ordered a 100 GB portable USB drive that I want to set up to dual
> boot both Windows XP and Linux.  What is perhaps a little different about
> what I
> want to do is that I want to be able to dual boot my USB drive from either
> OS and also from 2-3 different machines.  So, I'm thinking that for
> Windows, I will have a data partition that contains my personal files,
> data, etc and that I will then have a separate Windows partition for each
> machine.  For
> Linux, I would plan to have a separate data partition as well and then have
> different partitions for each machine and Linux distro.  Initially, I'm
> interested in trying Debian, Fedora Core 3 and perhaps Gentoo.  I plan to
> start by getting this running with just one machine and add a second and
> possibly third machine sometime later.  So, here are some of my questions:
> 
> 1.  I'm thinking I will probably need to do alot of partitioning and     
> resizing of partitions.  Is Partition Magic 8.0 the way to go here or are
> there better alternatives?  I've used Partition Magic in the past but not
> at all recently.  Reviews complain about poor technical support and
> possibly
> about draconian key activation issues.
> 
> 2.  Would I start by installing Windows XP first or Linux first?  Are
> there still limitations with Windows regarding the maximum cylinder on the
> hard drive which would dictate how I might do the partitioning?  For
> Windows,
> should I use NTFS or FAT32?
> 
> 3.  Are there any issues with this plan that I have not thought of?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -- 
> Dave Nystrom
> LANL X-2
> Phone: 505-667-7913
> Fax:   505-665-2227
> Email: wdn at lanl.gov
> Smail: Mail Stop T085
>        Group X-2
>        Los Alamos National Laboratory
>        Los Alamos, NM 87545
> 
> 
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