I have an external hard drive onto which I would like to install linux. I also have a laptop with a broken ide controller which has no hard drive. I would like to boot from a floppy disk or cdrom, and ...

Running Linux from a USB drive is possible. You can boot just about any distribution you want from USB. There are some things you should consider before going this route. I've used Linux in just about ...

External hard drives can be moved between systems, reformatted at will, and repurposed without risking the data or stability of a primary computer.