Hi all!! (rather happy got a new laptop so bear with my hyponess!)

So I have my new laptop (advent 7096 incase anyone is wondering ) And my dad said he will buy my an external hard drive for my birthday (this saturday!) And i do like linux and before i had a dual boot system with a choice of windows and a linux distro, but this has only a 40gb hard drive and with about 8.5-9 used up by windows already i fear that using this with a boot selector and partitioned could cause me to run out of room so my solution is to have linux on the external hard drive and windows on the internal.

But my question is this:

what happens if i plug the usb external hard drive into my windows system while windows is running? Because i will almost certainly use the external HD to store my college work and other college items (definately not games! ) and they will be probably windows based as the college system is based on windows, sorry this seems a little confusing i think but what im saying is, is it possible to have linux nstalled on a partition on the external HD and store windows documents (eg word docs) on it and still be able to access them from a windows machine?

I have a fear that when i plug the external HD in the windows system will try to find an autorun executable and then try to boot linux causin problems of having two operating systems fighting over one set of resources, so will the windows system do this or will it just show me the files and do nothing more?

Also im fairly sure that to boot into linux on the external HD it would be simple as to plug it in before i turn the machine on and then set the option in the BIOs to boot rom the USB and therefore into linux, is this the case?

I jus dont want to have a meltdown of windows fighting linux, though could be fun to watch if it wasnt on my machine !!

Farewell!

I'm not sure about booting linux via the external drive but i can answer a few of your other questions

yes you can have a windows partition on the external hdd (fat32 would probly best for better compatability with linux so it can access this stuff too) and have seperate partitions for linux.

no when you connect the drive while running windows it won't try to run linux, in most cases it won't even be able to "see" the linux partitions

hope that helps a bit

Yeh that helps alot, the main worry was windows trying to boot linux but if it cant even see linux then that wont be a problem so thats good news, I should imagine that the bot loader in linux will be able to bot linux from the external if i do what i said before or maybe there is a way to set one partition as the boot partition.

Thanks

Windows can't boot Linux , since both of them are Operating systems.
You can only select an operating system at boot time, by the BIOS settings or a Bootmanager.

You can have several parttions on your (external) hard drive.
But if you can you should place the boot partittion in the begin.
Since there may be problems when they get over ceratin limits.

Booting from an external hard drive can , but have to supported by your bios.
In some cases you can even boot from a memory stick.
If all that doesn't work , you can always use a live distribution of linux (like Knoppix , ... ).
They even exisist on DVD, they have a lot of software on it and only some settings will be save on your hard drive, I think that latest version there is even USB support for extranal harddrives and memory sticks.

Support for NTFS is not completly there (most of the time reading works , but writing have some problems).

That sounds like pretty much what I want to happen really so its all good! I havent checked my bios settings yet mainly out of laziness but as its a new machine i figure the bios should supprt booting on the usb so it should work.

Thanx