Booting from USB drive

[Michael]

I have just bought an external hard drive and would like to play around
with some linux distros. My motherboard doesn't support booting from a usb
drive (but does from a usb key. I wondered if it was possible to use the
external drive using a boot manager on the main hard drive to load from the
external drive?

Thanks for your help

 

[Arno Wagner]

I have just bought an external hard drive and would like to play around
with some linux distros. My motherboard doesn't support booting from a usb
drive (but does from a usb key. I wondered if it was possible to use the
external drive using a boot manager on the main hard drive to load from the
external drive?

Thanks for your help

This one is a bit tricky. The boot-manager would need to be able
to access the external drive, which it cannot really without the
USB drivers. However you can put Grub on a floppy and then boot
the kernel from some other place that the BIOS can reach, e.g.
a FAT partition. Or the aforementioned USB key. After the kernel
is loaded, it can access an installation on the USB HDD as well.

Arno