Quote Originally Posted by Sole
going to try to get it to work on a usb drive.
Well, my first thought was that even a hard drive on USB2 would be too slow (I sure hope you mean a hard drive and not a USB flash drive). But I decided to test this, particularly since I had just copied my Quake 3 arena directories to a USB drive in preperation of changing out the hard drive in my notebook. Here's what I learned:

Running from the OS on the main hard disk and then running Quake III from the USB2 hard disk, Quake starts noticably slower, but it does start and if you can live with the slow start it's not bad. Switching maps is somewhat slower, but not as bad as I expected (I have a very low opnion of USB). I didn't see any problems at all during play (I didn't expect to, but was wondering about it none the less), so as long as you are talking about a hard disk and a USB2 (not USB 1.1) interface, then Quake is playable. As far as booting frm USB goes, good luck, many people can but I've not been able to boot from USB yet, even on a notebook that has a USB boot option. As long as you have better luck booting from USB than I, this approach should work.