Booting off an external USB hard drive

[Ancalagon]

So..... I want to trade my Pokemanz online, but to do that, I need to create a software wireless access point because my house Wifi is WPA and not WEP.

If I was using XP, it would be a simple matter, but alas, I'm using Vista, and thus most software wifi access point software wont work on my PC. Thus, I need Linux. I dont want to butcher my main hard drives by installing linux on them (RAID 0 array, and I'm worried about messing with the boot loader etc), so I installed it on an external drive I have.

To do that, I partitioned the drive up into a 250GB ntfs partition for all my crap, and then left 30GB for the linux install. I installed Fedora 10 onto the 30GB partition (well, the unallocated space really) but I cant boot from it for some reason. I've changed the boot order etc, cant boot from it. I have booted from a USB device before (booted from a flash stick to flash my bios).

Does anyone know anything about booting off external USB drives? Could my drive be partitioned weirdly? I would take the drive out of its casing and install it as an IDE drive, but I cant find a screw driver to open the external HDD case.

Oh, I've tried using virtual machines for this purpose, it doesnt work cos they dont have direct access to my network hardware.

[frederec]

I don't have a huge amount of experience with this, but generally if your machine is capable of that, isn't that something you would set up in your BIOS in your boot priorities? And I would wonder if it would be easier to boot linux from a live distro like Knoppix or something like that. The one time I tried to extract data off a dying hard drive a Knoppix CD got the job done nicely. Or do you want it off a USB drive so you can alter the installation and stuff like that?

[Ancalagon]

Yeah, I need to alter the installation to make it work as a software wireless access point. I need my DS to connect to the wifi card on my pc and then to bridge the wired and wifi connections. DS's dont work with ad hoc mode unfortunately.

I'll poke around in the bios, but as I said I've already booted off a USB device before.

[mesh]

No idea if the limit has been removed in more recent systems, but it used to be that a partition couldn't boot if it was past the 1024th cylinder on the hdd, putting it on the end probably means it is.

By won't boot, what happens exactly? an error? a blank screen? etc?

[Ancalagon]

Yeah, a blank screen with a flashing cursor.

It probably is at the end, since I was using it as an NTFS formatted storage drive for years before shrinking the NTFS partition by 30GB and using that space for Linux.

So... good thing to do would be to find a place for my stuff, format the drive, and install it fresh? Will see what I can save or delete.

EDIT: I'm posting this from Fedora 10! It worked! Looks kinda good, I must say. Wont replace windows for me, but at least I'm one step closer to being able to trade Pokemanz.

[KingGorilla]

You can create a Linux boot disc on a thumb drive dude.

http://lifehacker.com/software/linux/how-to-install-linux-on-a-usb-drive-160132.php