I have an 80 Gig external USB drive and want to set up a full guest OS on it so I can utilize my drive elsewhere without actually intruding on someone else's machine except for utilizing their hardware. I run into difficulty with a regular install of any OS because it sets up according to the hardware I initially installed the OS on. Naturally, elsewhere, hardware will be different. I need a situation where I have a full OS install to the USB drive, such as Debian, but it also needs to detect and utilize whatever hardware I am hooked up to, in the manner the Knoppix Live CD does.

Basically, I guess what I am saying is that I need something to run like a normal install of Debian or Fedora does but with the ability to detect and configure hardware at boot up like a Live CD does. Is it possible?