Hello,

I'm looking for a way to boot Linux from a USB-disk. Is this possible?

If this has already been discussed here can you please give me a link (I didn't find one). Thanks.

My situation: my Notebook (bought from Aldi about 6 months ago) has an internal disk with WinXP which I want to keep. So I want to add an additional disk with Linux on it. I've read that booting WinXP from a USB-disk does not work (officially). So I have to use the internal disk for WinXP and an external disk for Linux. Can I do this with Linux?

What I got:
Knoppix 5.01 works on this notebook. After booting from the CD I go to a commandline and enter the command to install Knoppix (for safety I removed the internal disk). Works. Now I have to reboot the machine and this works too: it boots from the external disk. Fine. But when I power down the machine and later power it on again Linux does no longer boot. Here are the effects:

test #1: with a 2.5" disk (needs 2 USB-connections)
there are a lot of lines coming onto the screen so I can assume that the boot-process works, but then:
sda: udevd-event [13309] wait for sysfs .......... failed
after this
reset high speed USB device
this occurs multiple times
sd 0:0:0:0 SCSI error, return code 0x50000
ALERT! /dev/sda does not exist

test #2: with a 3.5" disk (has an extra power-connector)
again a lot of lines telling what it is doing (but it takes some time). And then:
sda: sda1 sda 2
sd 0:0:0:0 Attached scsi disk sda
and it's hanging.

What's wrong here? Or is it (currently) not possible to boot from USB-harddisk?

AugustQ

PS: I tried the following distros too but they all failed. Knoppix seems to be the one to go.
The others were: SuSE 10.1, Xandros 3.1, Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu (from the c't some weeks ago), PCLinuxOS
All had the problem that they did not detect my USB-disk during installation.