Any one boot from a "My Passport" drive?

[horusfalcon]

At the risk of a necro-post here, I need to add to this discussion.

Anyone wanting to avoid proprietary BS would be well advised to build their own USB drives.  Newegg.com and other reliable vendors sell products from Nippon Labs, Syba, Masscool, Sabrent, and other vendors that allow one to use a hard drive already in hand as an external.  Enclosures, "docking stations" and other products are available that allow connection of laptop and/or desktop hard drives over USB and eSATA.  Here's one example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817816003

For ten bucks you get the enclosure, its cable, all hardware, a Windows driver disk (makes a good coaster )and a screwdriver to put it together with.  Yeah, it's a special cable, but at this price, any laptop drive from 320 GB on down is now a fit-in-a-shirt-pocket portable that doesn't need a power brick.  At that price, I'd pay to buy the entire kit just to get a spare cable if I needed one.

I've got two of these in service right now, one with the old 80 gig SATA drive out of my D620, and another with an old 160 gig SATA I acquired in a parts swap.  Both are cookin' along just fine, and the 80 boots Full Monty for my laptop at work (for use as a recovery tool if XP ever goes belly up).

Nippon Labs also makes an IDE version of this same enclosure, but it's getting harder to find these days.  Fortunately, Masscool and Sabrent are making very similar enclosures in the same price range, and, as I mentioned earlier, lots of others are out there.

There are other kits at Newegg (and elsewhere) that fit varying needs, so you don't have to put up with vendors that like to lock you in.  I have avoided WD and Seagate/Maxtor like the plague for the past several years, preferring drives from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for speed, reliability, and price.

Just my two shekels worth.

Later On,
D

[Just17]

Just a FYI for anyone sharing an external HDD across OSs.
As already posted, some Win OSs require the first primary partition to be one of its own, or it wants to format the drive.

So, a suggestion .... to make that external HDD really useful ......  format the first partition to suit Win, make it whatever size is most useful, but leave at least a few GBs of space for an ext partition.

Use that ext partition to do a live install of PCLOS.
Now the HDD is both a data container for sharing with Win and also a live USB device when required.
In fact, if the ext partition is large enough you can have all flavours of PCLOS on it and run any of them live ...... great for determining which DE is most suitable for particular hardware.

[horusfalcon]

Just18 makes some excellent points here.  It's a good thing when you can do multiple duty with one drive. 

The only point I was really making was that you don't have to buy "pre-fab" external drives at higher prices when you can cheaply build your own.  Some of the models I didn't discuss have more generic mini-B USB cables, but I find them to be a touch less reliable than the ones I use, and for the price, hey, it does what I need done.

There are even DIY 3.5 inch drive enclosures, but they are considerably more expensive and the result is much less portable.  (Most all of them have some form of external power in addition to a data cable to lug around.)

For the ultimate in swappability, though, look at something like these.  A good bit more expensive, but no cables to worry with, and the security of drives being physically removable and stored "offsite" for backups.

It's all in what you're into, what your needs are.  There are always solutions out there, if you're is willing to look.


Later On,
D