Question : Problem: External Hard Drives - new OS?

I bought Linux 8.1 and since I'm using xp/ntfs I can't install it. I'm wondering if an external hard drive will install this?

Answer : Problem: External Hard Drives - new OS?

Well, it might work, but I think you would have to boot from a diskette everytime you wanted to use Linux.  You'd probably be better off either adding another physical drive to your system (internally) or using Partition Magic or other partition management utility to resize your NTFS partition to leave room for Linux at the end.

In either case, see this:
http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html

Good information on setting it up.  Plus an internal harddrive certainly costs less than an external Firewire or USB2.0 drive, you don't have to worry about drivers, and you can partition the drive to use some of it in XP also.  You would likely only need 4GB at most for Linux unless you really want to make it your primary OS.  I think the newer Linux distros can mount NTFS drives also so you can get to files, but not 100% on that.

-dog*