[NTLUG:Discuss] Can one boot from an external Hard Drive ?

[Alvin Goats]

You may have to use a boot floppy. The boot floppy would load a kernel
that has USB support and direct the rest of the load to the USB drive.
Problem will be having the USB drive come up in a consistent place.

An alternative will be to have /boot on the laptop's local drive and
have it load the USB drive from there. 

I haven't done this with USB, but I have used boot floppies to boot
other devices not otherwise accessable.

Alvin