Laptops that Boot From External Drives? 42
ducman asks: "I'm a consultant and carry two laptops. I have to assume that my employer can see everything I do and access every file I store on the machine they provided me with. But I'm tired of hauling two laptops (and power supplies, etc) everywhere I go. My personal machine is an Apple TiBook, which will boot off an external, firewire drive. Could I do the same thing with an Intel laptop and run Linux on it for personal stuff? Am I the only one with this problem?" Which Intel-based laptop, that supports booting from an external drive, would you recommend?
Simple. (Score:2, Insightful)
That being said, unless your company consists of facists, or you are using the laptop for, um, illicit purposes, I don't really see what the problem is. Just *never* store anything personal on your corporate laptop and you should be ok.
Re:Simple. (Score:2, Insightful)
This shouldn't be too difficult. The easiest immediate solution is to use a boot CD to boot the firewire/usb drive. Shouldn't be hard since he plans to use Linux. Even simpler, you could even use something like the Knoppix live CD and then use the external drive just to store data (mpegs of wife stripping or whatever).
I can't say I know of any laptops that can boot directly to a firewire/usb drive, but I would be interested in this as well.
CD + Floppy (Score:3, Interesting)
Why does this make you scared? (Score:2, Insightful)
I understand a request for privacy, but I don't understand what keystrokes you are concerned they'll catch.
Second, and if your laptop doesn't support external booting, just load up a minimal install and mount the drive as root, or pivot_root it or something. Should be easy nuff to set up.
Re:Why does this make you scared? (Score:1)
*scratches head* (Score:3, Insightful)
Or are you afraid some piece of proprietary company software contains spy tools, letting the IS department observe your doings? Yeah, I can see where that would be a problem.
You might have more luck with a generic brand notebook PC than with one of the name brands. Companies like Dell and Sony tend to rip some of the features out of the system BIOSes to keep people from screwing them up and then calling for help. A good generic laptop would probably have a default BIOS with all the features therein intact.
Re:*scratches head* (Score:1)
Re:*scratches head* (Score:1)
Re:*scratches head* (Score:2)
Generally, if they pay the bill, they decide what to buy, so again: What enlightened nirvana company do you work for?
Re:*scratches head* (Score:2)
Re:*scratches head* (Score:2)
In order to decrease their work load, they typically standardize on a few specific PC models and set-ups, and when a user blows it to hell they restore from a standard drive image. Ordering a special piece of hardware with a non-standard set-up usually requires a note from upper management saying "take care of this guy, he's cool", and a contract signed in blood, in triplicate, saying "I will never bring this machine to you".
I've been on both sides of this... (Score:2)
boot Knoppix off a cd-rom (Score:5, Informative)
Knoppix is a full featured linux system on a bootable cd-rom that does not require any writable storage (but can use it if you've got it).
Re:boot Knoppix off a cd-rom (Score:2)
This was exactly my suggestion, but a couple of others already seem to be suggesting it. Let's not mince words: "Knoppix Rocks!"
You get REAL desktop/user Linux, including StarOffice. On ThinkPad t20's and 600X's and recent Dell Inspirons I have had full video/audio support, and instant 802.11b with zero configuration effort!
USB drives work great for data, and are detected on boot. The Inspiron has FireWire and works too.
I have graduated to a slightly more complex setup - I use a 48MB PCMCIA "FlashDisk" to store rsa keys and persistant scripts. I can add my local user, and mount shares via AFS and ssh-tunnel after the desktop comes up - or not!
Here's a good question for Knoppix fans: Knoppix is obviously a great forensics and security tool, with all the bundled utilities and default ro mounting of all discovered local partitions. Net security is cool too. There is tcpdump, netcat, ethereal, iptraf, even nessus/nessusd! But why no snort!
It's not hard to build your own customized Knoppix [gnu.org] (heck, it's Debian.) My next step is doing this, to ditch the scirpts on flash - move 'em into a local rc and include snort!
Swap HDs, Bootloaders (Score:5, Insightful)
So how do you boot the drive? Well, you have a few options. If the drive is internal (like the second drive, since booting the 1st is easy) you could put a bootloader (GRUB, LILO, etc) on the main drive. Your second option is that you can use programs (I think that one is called loadlin) that let you load Linux from windows. You just pass it a kernel and initrd if needed, etc and you can boot. So if you just built firewire, firewire HDs, and such into the kernel, you should be able to use a firewire drive as your Linux drive (initrd should make this easier). This way even if the BIOS won't let you boot a firewire drive, you can still do it.
Re:Swap HDs, Bootloaders (Score:1)
Re:Swap HDs, Bootloaders (Score:2)
Unlikely. If the BIOS can't see and boot the disk, than grub or lilo won't be able to read the disk to boot from it.
Try Compaq M700 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Try Compaq M700 (Score:2)
interesting fact... (Score:5, Informative)
It will boot up and show a big firewire logo on the screen, and then if you plug it into a second apple, the other system will mount the first machine's hard disk. (kind of a security problem actually)
I wonder if you could put a windows partition on the apple's hard disk and access it with the intel laptop...
Re:interesting fact... (Score:5, Informative)
kind of a security problem actually
You can disable this ability with Apple's Open Firmware lock. [apple.com]
Re:interesting fact... (Score:2)
Either way, to be secure, the hard drive should have some sort of 'drive lock' on it that requires authentication and then allows access.
Dell Is the Way (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Dell Is the Way (Score:1)
Why do you assume the Intel laptop will run Linux? (Score:1)
Re:Why do you assume the Intel laptop will run Lin (Score:1)
My bonehead solution (Score:3, Interesting)
FYI - I use SSH to tunnel to a personal linux box from the work desktop and tunnel all my POP, SMTP, HTTP, and IM communications to keep everything private.
Can it be done? (Score:2, Informative)
1. Buy a laptop with a swappable drive bay; or
2. You shouldn't want to boot from an external drive. Nothing to see here folks, move on.
Someone else mentioned using a CD based Linux distro like Knoppix or DemoLinux and then mounting the external storage after that. That would work, but would be a huge pain in the ass if you wanted to do much more than experiment superficially.
Need to upgrade the kernel? Figure out what kinds of changes throughout the CD you'd have to make (special cases due to being on a CD) and then put the kernel on there. Upgrade a package that's on the CD? Have to get another machine to copy the image of the CD to, install the RPM/DEB/TGZ then figure out how to make a new CD. Not incredibly impossible for a Linux guru, but definately not something approachable for a relative newbie whenever she wants to install a package that already exists on the CD.
Again- not impossible, but a bit daunting. Sure would be a lot easier if the PC hardware was as well designed as the Mac counterparts.
About the booting via a bootloader like lilo or
GRUB:
How possible is that? Do any of these bootloaders have drivers for USB, USB2 or FireWire? One of the really cool things about Mac hardware is OpenFirmware, which makes possible booting off of the network (no matter if your card explicitly supports it in its own ROM or not), USBx, FireWire or SCSI.
Re:Can it be done? (Score:2)
How possible is that? Do any of these bootloaders have drivers for USB, USB2 or FireWire? One of the really cool things about Mac hardware is OpenFirmware, which makes possible booting off of the network (no matter if your card explicitly supports it in its own ROM or not), USBx, FireWire or SCSI.
Using grub, it *might* be possible using a firewire drive, assuming the BIOS recognizes it as such at boot time. i.e. grub-install
But, as I said, you'd have to recognize it as such at boot time. The only way I could really see this working would be with a cardbus scsi controller that's bootable.
SCSI? VMWare? (Score:2)
Also, many higher-end "business" laptops allow you to boot from
If you are running Windows 2000 or XP on the laptop, consider running a VMWare virtual machine on an encrypted directory. It would be probaly be slow, but an admin would have to actually log in as your user to do anything with the virtual machine.
Re:SCSI? VMWare? (Score:1)
Why run the vmWare from a encrypted disk? Have your own stuff on the encrypted disk. Run vmWare from the fastest disk (setup) on your system.
Re:SCSI? VMWare? (Score:2)
I'd run vmware from the encrypted disk to keep IT snoops out of it. The virtual computer resides in a file on disk.
Easy (Score:2)
Just run User-mode Linux or VMWare, according to what OSes you want to boot natively and from the removable drive. They will happily boot off any medium you can plug in.
Or, better, just put your private data in an encrypted file system, and unmount it when your employer might get to it. It doesn't even need its own partition, it can be in a regular file. Of course this assumes you're running Linux or a BSD, but you can run VMWare under that to load any cheesy employer-favored OS.
IBM Laptops... (Score:1)
linux ppc (Score:1)
Related Question (Score:2)
Re:Related Question (Score:1)
Re:Related Question (Score:2)
I guess you could do firewire booting with linuxbios on one of the supported platforms. At least, I hope you could :P
Re:Related Question (Score:1)
good point about LinuxBIOS!