Boot Linux from a FireWire Device
By Martyn Honeyford2005-04-12
Removable Drive Options
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The range of removable devices onto which Linux may be installed ranges from floppy drives, through USB-flash devices, on to USB/FireWire hard drives, and more.
While it is certainly possible to install Linux on a small-capacity device such as a 1.44MB floppy or a 32MB USB-key, these are usually (necessarily) specialized, cut-down distributions intended for, for instance, rescuing broken installations.
External hard drives, however, offer the most flexibility for a general purpose Linux distribution at a reasonable cost.
External drives are available in a large number of different sizes from a number of different manufacturers (Maxtor, Western Digital, and so on). These drives tend to consist of an external box, which holds a standard 3-1/2 inch or 2-1/2 inch IDE drive. These drives then are typically connected to the computer via USB or IEEE1394 (FireWire) connection.
USB comes in two main versions, 1.1 and 2.0. Version 1.1 has a maximum transfer speed of 12 Mbit/s (megabits per second), whereas version 2.0 supports transfer speeds of up to 480 Mbit/s. While most 2.0-compatible drives are backwardly compatible with 1.1, it is generally advisable to avoid using 1.1 unless there is no other option (due to its slow speed).
The FireWire standard also defines a number of different possible speeds, but in reality, whenever people say FireWire, they mean "FireWire400," which supports transfers up to 400 Mbit/s.
There is little to choose between USB 2.0 and FireWire in terms of speed: although USB 2.0 has a higher quoted speed, in practice they both tend to be comparable due to differences in the protocols. If your machine has both, it is probably worth going for USB rather than FireWire (for reasons I'll explain later), but if it has only FireWire, then of course you will go for that. For maximum flexibility, choose one of a number of drives that support both USB 2.0 and FireWire (such as the one I use later in this article).
For machines that do not have the required ports, PCI (for desktop) and PCMCIA (for laptop), FireWire and USB 2.0 cards are now available very inexpensively: for example, the PCMCIA FireWire card I use later in this article was purchased for approximately 10 GBP (under $20 US).
For the purposes of this article, I have purchased a 5-1/4 inch external drive enclosure. This is a very flexible enclosure, which is supplied with no drive and can be filled with any standard IDE device, including 3-1/2 inch hard drives and 5-1/4 inch IDE devices such as CD-RW/DVD-RW drives. The enclosure has both USB 2.0 and FireWire connections.
In order to connect the enclosure to my IBM Thinkpad T30 laptop, I also purchased a PCMCIA FireWire card (as the built-in USB ports only support USB 1.1).
Both the enclosure and the FireWire card were relatively inexpensive (approximately 50 GBP and 10 GBP, respectively).
For testing purposes, I fitted the enclosure with a 13GB 3-1/2 inch IDE drive I had laying around -- for real world usage, I would buy a larger capacity drive, which again are now very cheap (approximately 50 GBP per gig!).
Tutorial Pages:
» Installing Linux on Removable Drives
» Removable Drive Options
» Linux Support
» Installation
» Booting
» Building the Boot Image
» Resources
First published by IBM DeveloperWorks
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