I run openSuSe 11.1 on a Medion MD96340 laptop. I connected a 160 GB SATA notebook hard drive to it via an eSATA express card and a hard drive dock. I want to be able to start an OS such as openSuSe from that external drive. I have partitioned the drive with Gparted. SuSe sees and mounts the partitions without problems. I can move files back and forth and I successfully installed openSuse 11.1 on it. So no problems with openSuSe, but I cannot boot the operating system on it, as the drive is not seen in the BIOS. When I connect the drive to my laptop using the USB cable, it does show up in the BIOS, but running an OS though USB is too slow.
I also tried this with a Toshiba L305-S9515 notebook, which also has an express card slot and the result was exactly the same as on the Medion.
Can anybody advise me why the drive is perfectly recognized in openSuSE, but not in the BIOS, unless I use USB. What can I do to change the BIOS settings so that it is seen there?
I think I found the cause of this problem: I connected the eSATA drive to a new DELL laptop that had an eSATA port. On this laptop the drive is shown in the BIOS. Conclusion: most laptops do not yet recognize eSATA drives yet. This technology is too new. For my own laptops I need to find an updated BIOS. Once booted, all Linux distros, including openSUSE, that I have tried see the eSATA drive correctly. For the moment, I can use the drive for storage, or I can use the OS on it via USB (slow).