Need to cross-boot Red Hat Linux on T42

[PaulB]

I currently boot Windows XP from my T42's internal hardrive, and would like to like to be able to boot Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from an external USB drive (leaving the internal hard drive for Windows).

Does anybody know where I could find instructions on how to do this?

Thanks for your help,,,
,,,Paul Beaubien

[revolutionary_one]

First of all congratulations on the 2378-FVU

Its really pretty simple, I'm assuming you dont want to install a bootloader to the notebook HD so you need to find some way of getting the BIOS to point to the external USB HDD as the first device to probe on boot.

Otherwise, you can also create a cd to point to the external HDD.

[PaulB]

I should be a bit more specific...

I'm looking for a link to instructions/documentation on how to do the full installation. For example, I assume I have to install Thinkpad Drivers after installing the RedHat Linux distribution. I'm not sure were to start...

[icantux]

Haven't seen instructions myself, but the installation should be rather straightforward. Personally I have winXP (work) on my main drive, and WinXP (testing), gentoo (main OS) and fedora core 5 (testing) on my second drive in the ultrabay. I use F12 to specify the boot drive and then grub to specify the boot option on the second drive (choosing between xp, gentoo or fedora).

Come to think of it, there is a thread here that explains how to install and use linux on a drive in the ultrabay, that will help you along in your quest. Are you planning to use the ultrabay adapter or using a USB external drive?

The best possible way to get linux on a drive in the ultrabay would be to swap out your current drive (main drive) with the drive on which you'd like linux to reside on. Install linux from CD, then just tweak the grub parameters to point to your linux on the second drive - whether it's /dev/hda or /dev/hdc will depend on the location of the second drive that contains linux. If you use the ultrabay adapter it will remain "hda" since the thinkpad's bios will treat the ultrabay HDD as a primary boot device when selected using F12 - otherwise if your second drive is in a USB enclosure it may read /dev/hdc or otherwise -- as long as you can safely boot from it.)

Keep in mind that some USB enclosures are not reliable for booting any OS - they're specifically intended for "expanding storage capabilities", so you may encounter some/many problems booting/using linux of any flavour (windose would encounter the same problems on many USB external drives as they're not all made equally).