If you recall, I bought myself the Icy Box External SATA holder and for most part I used this as a means to add extra drives as required (mostly 2.5″ models) for storing data. As this device operates with eSATA (as well as USB) – this means it can be as fast as a normal internal harddrive. I pondered on the thought of having various operating systems per drive and by selecting this on bootup – I can indeed boot into another OS without ditrubing my present system
Preparing the disk
On my internal Drive on my Dell I have Windows 7 64Bit, I did not want to upset this by adding Linux although it is not that bad an idea (same end result). The Laptop I have already has Ubuntu 10.04 64bit installed, so the task at hand was to make a exact image of this onto another 80GIG SATA 2.5″ Drive.
I used the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows to boot the Laptop which gives a Windows like OS and the ability to run Norton Ghost, I had attached a 60GIG USB Drive with the idea to make a image of the Linux box. Ghost kept telling me that Linux needed to run CHKDSK, I tried this and it made no difference. In the end I got a USB Lead and plugged the Caddy into the Laptop and use a direct Image copying program to amke a 100% exact duplicate of the drive. As this was USB, this took some time.
Will it work?
After re-attaching the eSATA to my Dell machine and the 80GIG Drive which now has a copy of Ubuntu Installed – I pressed F12 (to select the Boot device). There was a large list offered and finally I worked out that the one to pick was Toshiba which had 80 in the title somewhere. Soon I was booting up Ubuntu desktop and as the Laptop also had ATI – I was good to go for Compiz. Everything worked as expected, it was fast and easy to boot into Linux when needed although if I was going to work with Linux, I would probably be happy enough with VMWARE for example as Virtually it runs very fast (due to Core i7 and 9GIG RAM).
Other possibilites
What about Hackintosh? You can install or have an attempt at least and just pick this external drive and if it does work – you just press F12 and boot into the drive, instant OSX and should you instead want to use Windows 7, then simply reboot – no dead machine. I can imagine you can do the Same with USB2 Drive but it will be a lot slower – so be warned.
