Advanced Fedora Installation question (expert advice/reply needed)?

Question

Ok, I need someone to answer this who REALLY knows what they're talking about and can explain it lamens terms. I have a Windows XP machine with only a 40GB Harddrive. I recently bought an external Harddrive with about 300GB on it. Now I may have a few questions so please bare with me. I have a working Fedora 9 Linux bootable DVD, I checked it myself, this is what I want to do, I want to INSTALL Fedora 9 onto my External drive and leave my current teeny 40GB XP drive alone. I dont think its small enough to shrink to fit two operating systems on plus I barely have enough room on the XP drive anyway. From what I understand from reading my Linux installion books (Im a networking student) is that Linux can be installed on a HD with Windows on it which is fine, but thats not what I want to do. Question 1: Is it possible to have Windows on the internal drive and another OS such as Linux on an external drive and have a boot loader determine the difference and be able to boot from the two, depending on which one I choose? Also, Question 2: if the Answer is YES, Where DO I put the BOOTLOADER without mucking up my computer? LOL. Also this is probably more of a Hardware based question, my external drive is connected to my XP machine thru the USB that came with it....As I understand it, the internal drive is connected to the motherboard thru IDE ribbons which it is supposed to be, Question 3: Is there a clear cut difference between disk drives connected to the motherboard thru IDE or USB? Can an operating system run thru a USB cord or does it have to be an internal drive with IDE? I would greatly appreciate responses that can at least touch on each one of my questions or point me in the right direction, also if you come across this question and do not know the answers but may know someone who does, please direct them to this page. I would greatly appreciate it, THANK YOU.

Answer 1

Provided the installer can see the external drive this presents no problem. You will boot fron the CD, then it may offer you an install onto the USB drive. This will be seen as SDA normally. It should offer sensible partioning on this drive. If not you will select the expert option and manually set the partitions. Set a 100MB partition for the /boot as a primary partition. Then a suitable (I often use 2GB) size for a swap partition. The rest can be set to /, although it may be better to create a large /home in order to allow saving your data if you ever need to re-install. Do NOT make the / partition too small. Depending on what you use the machine for it may need to be 20GB or even more. Set the boot loader (Grub is best) to the MBR on your internal drive. Through the USB the drive will not run as fast as an internal but I have a few machines running as servers with USB drives, and they perform perfectly well.