I have a corporate laptop (HP nx5000, getting a new one in the summer). It's a Pentium M 1.6 and 1GB of memory. Anyway, the company I work for put full restrictions on Windows. I can't install programs, attach most devices, etc. What I want to do is buy an external HDD or a flash drive and boot Windows or Linux from there when I'm not at work or traveling for work. BIOS does support booting from an external device afaik. How feasible is this? Can I just disable the internal drive in BIOS, plug in the external and set it to master...Then unplug it and switch back to the internal when I want to use the company OS?
The biggest problem is that any external drive will be waaaaay too slow to be used as a boot drive. I would say just swap the hard drive entirely. It shouldn't be to hard to do that, mabye a couple screws. Mabye pick up a 2nd hard drive caddy (if it uses one) on ebay for a few bucks.
I did a little more research and found a guide that shows how to do exactly what I want and a config that will let XP run like normal. But I'm not going to mess with it right now since this is a company laptop and I don't want to nuke anything. Take a look and tell us what you think. http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176
Well, I bought a 7200rpm external WD 120GB (no external power needed). I made the necessary modifications to my XP install CD. I'll let you all know how it goes tomorrow.
Thats not actually true. I've done a number of tests on laptop HDs and externals. A 7200RPM 8MB cache HD with a oxford firewire enclosure is actually noticably faster (read, write, as well as real world tests such as games and such) than the 4200RPMs most laptops came with just a few years ago. I was pretty shocked by it too.
Bah, they castrated the bios. My only boot options are internal HDD, multibay HDD, and ethernet. I'm hosed.
