Dual-boot of Two Separate PCLinuxOS installations from a USB Hard Drive

[horusfalcon]

Hi, Gang,

I'm working on a little ad-hoc project at work to support a set of five Dell Latitude D620 notebooks.  My plan is to use a USB hard drive with two separate PCLinuxOS installations on it to account for minor hardware differences among these machines (we have some laptops with intel video hardware, and some with Nvidia).

The intent is to use the USB drive as a data recovery tool in the event XP takes a powder and becomes unbootable some fine day.

The questions I am having are:

     1.)  Is maintaining two separate installations really necessary? (i.e., is there a way to support both hardware sets from one installation?)
     2.)  If the answer to question (1.) is "yes", then would it also be necessary to maintain separate swap files and separate /home partitions?

I'm thinking that swap is flushed during a shutdown/reboot, and that /home will have some config files different between the two hardware sets, so that a common swap might be okay, but common /home partitions is a bad idea.

What say you, folks?

Thanks for any insights.

Later On,
D

[Just17]

Have you tried using one installation for all?

If that did not work then what failed?

[dvhenry]

The intent is to use the USB drive as a data recovery tool in the event XP takes a powder and becomes unbootable some fine day.

But any Linux liveCD liveUSB will find data recovery from XP to be a walk in the park, why do you want two seperate ISO's? do you want to minimize the size by reducing the number of drivers? If so why not keep it to CLI only?

[horusfalcon]

Have you tried using one installation for all?

If that did not work then what failed?

When I attempt to boot one of the intel-based machines on the install for the Nvidias, it kernel panics during boot.  Hangs up hard.  I wind up having to shut down forcibly.

The intent is to use the USB drive as a data recovery tool in the event XP takes a powder and becomes unbootable some fine day.

But any Linux liveCD liveUSB will find data recovery from XP to be a walk in the park, why do you want two seperate ISO's? do you want to minimize the size by reducing the number of drivers? If so why not keep it to CLI only?

Hmm... maybe I need to learn more about liveUSB?  I've never looked at that.  Thanks - I knew I'd find food for thought here.

Later On,
D

[EDIT]  I won't be the only one using this tool when I get it developed and the rest of the folks are Linux neophytes (read: Windows users) who will be much more comfortable in a GUI of some sort (I'm leaning toward KDE as being the most "Windows-like", meaning absolutely no insult to KDE.)

[Just17]

Using a live system may do all you want .....  else maybe set the install to use a generic graphics, like Vesa which should do for most anything ....  or have separate boot options for both types ...