Extra hard drive for openSUSE 11.0

[alexkelley]

Hello,

I have an Acer Aspire 5000 running XP. I'd like to put openSUSE 11.0 on a separate hard drive and swap between them while I make the transition. I don't really want to partition the exisiting hard drive as it is pretty loaded. My goal is to eventually migrate from XP entirely but my wife will still want XP. I also use my computer for my business so I don't really want to have my "experiments" interrupt my work. An additional hard drive seems to be the cheapest and cleanest solution. Does anyone see any problem with this strategy? Thanks for your input.

[caf4926]

That sounds like a laptop?
So maybe you are thinking a usb drive.
I have a a WD elements 500GB usb which works fine

You will need to have usb booting in bios
It can be a bit fiddly but you won't be writing grub to your main hd mbr, so you will easily get online to ask for help.

[alexkelley]

It is a laptop.

My first thought was to physically swap the hard drives. Is this a bad idea?

With the external USB drive route, will I take a big performance hit by running everything from it?

[caf4926]

Originally Posted by alexkelley

It is a laptop.

My first thought was to physically swap the hard drives. Is this a bad idea? Probably. Not quite sure what you mean - replace with something larger/ surely not swap every time you want to use it.

With the external USB drive route, will I take a big performance hit by running everything from it? Should be fine. There are firewire devices which should be quicker, but usb 2 is good enough.

explain a little more if you can to point 1

[alexkelley]

Point 1 was to exchange between 2 drives each time I wanted to use a different operating system. From your reply, I take that to be a not-so-great idea :-) The USB option appears to be better. I'll search around for a good tutorial on it. I appreciate your feedback.

[caf4926]

check here
HOWTOs - openSUSE

I would probably format it etc first to ext3 with a boot cd like parted magic, you can make it a bootable drive too with that I think.