- #51
PerennialII
Science Advisor
Gold Member
- 900
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Yes - and it's a neat way of doing it while preserving your original system. There is the requirement that your hardware (BIOS) needs to be able to boot from the external drive, usb/firewire/esata or whatever you might be using. "Relatively recent" systems shouldn't have a problem, you can check this by entering BIOS when starting your system and checking the boot order (and while you're at it make sure the external drive is ahead of your internal HDD).
And yes, you can naturally make 2 partitions to your external drive and install linux to the other, linux distros don't necessarily take up much space at all (I've one with me in a usb stick at all times
). You can do the partitioning when doing the linux install, from your existing system, or then use a specialized tool like gparted or partition magic.
And probably a good idea to make sure you've backups of your system and overall make sure you don't "confuse" the drives while you're at it
.
And yes, you can naturally make 2 partitions to your external drive and install linux to the other, linux distros don't necessarily take up much space at all (I've one with me in a usb stick at all times
). You can do the partitioning when doing the linux install, from your existing system, or then use a specialized tool like gparted or partition magic. And probably a good idea to make sure you've backups of your system and overall make sure you don't "confuse" the drives while you're at it
.
. If you google something like 'installing linux on usb' you'll likely find a couple of tutorials you can review beforehand (or 'installing fedora on usb' in my case).
