Is this hardware setup viable for booting?

Factual Questions
1

So last week I set up my computer to dual-boot Ubuntu and XP. I tried to do Wine in Ubuntu to open XP stuff (mainly for Gchat), but that didn’t work, and VMware won’t work on my machine (something about i386, I don’t really remember). I’m satisfied with that setup for now, but there’s something I’m curious about for my next computer.

Suppose I had Ubuntu (or some other Linux distro) on my main hard drive, and XP on either an external hard drive or a (8-16 gig) jump drive. Would that allow me to boot into either, and not have to bother with picking the OS if the XP drive isn’t connected?

2

I’m afraid not. The choices of OSes to boot is set in a configuration file on the hard drive. The bootloader is not able to determine dynamically whether the hard drive is there or not and take action based on that.

3

Not true. Boot selection can be set in the BIOS. If you set the BIOS to check a USB port before it checks the harddrive, then it’ll boot from the USB port if there’s a drive connected (assuming it’s got an OS on it).

4

Almost forgot, you don’t want to use a flash based drive to boot from. Unless you buy really expensive flashdrives (like the Mac Air uses), the flash memory on typical thumbdrive has a finite number of read and writes that it can handle. It’s not a problem in ordinary use, but running an OS on it, unless you configure the OS to use an ordinary drive for things like the cache, you’ll quickly (as in a matter of weeks, IIRC) kill the thumbdrive.

5

Of course, this ignores the probable difficulties of installing Windows on a removable hard drive. (That is, actually obtaining an installable copy that I can use for this purpose.)

6

Ah. That’s a clever idea; I hadn’t thought of that. That would work.

I suspect the performance problems from putting Windows on a USB drive would make the idea unusable, sadly.

7

On modern machines, you can set the BIOS to boot from an external drive. But I think the performance would be dreadful.

You’re better off investing in a removable drive caddy and switching drives that way.

8

With your new machine you might want to give VMWare another go. I’m a big fan. There’s really not much you can’t do in a VM except for low level hardware stuff or advanced graphics (but they’re working on that too). Never gonna dual boot again if I can help it.