External cases for internal IDE drives; LiveCDs

[Robert Brockway]

On Tue, 6 Jun 2006, moliver-fC0AHe2n+mcIvw5+aKnW+Pd9D2ou9A/h at public.gmane.org wrote:

> Does anyone have any experience with external cases
> (USB or parallel port) for internal IDE drives?  I

I've used many Firewire or Firewire/USB enclosures and added my own HDDs 
over the years.

> need one to work with quite an old drive (4GB).  It
> came with a Dell machine; I know Dell sometimes has
> some incompatibilities.  Will that make a difference?

If the drive adheres to one of the ATA standards it should be fine.  Dell 
(like just about everyone else) just uses drives from one of the small 
number of drive manufacturers.  Therefore I'd say it should work fine.

> I'd appreciate pointers to any brands that have worked
> for you.

I've used a number of different brands.  Lately I've been using the Lantec 
NexStar 2 as it has Firewire & USB and (unlike some of the alternatives) 
is very quick to get a drive installed.

> On another note, can anyone recommend a bootable Linux CD
> (Live CD or some such) that will work on quite an old
> machine (128 MB RAM) and has NTFS support?

Knoppix 3.9 has read-write NTFS support.  Even much older versions had 
read-only support.  128MB will be fine to boot Knoppix.  If you are 
comfortable with the command line you may wish to boot with "knoppix 2" to 
come up without X.  This makes the boot much faster.

Rob

-- 
Robert Brockway B.Sc.        Phone:          +1-905-821-2327
Senior Technical Consultant  Urgent Support: +1-416-669-3073
OpenTrend Solutions Ltd      Email:          support-wgAaPJgzrDxH4x6Dk/4f9A at public.gmane.org
                              Web:            www.opentrend.net
We are open 24x365 for technical support.  Call us in a crisis.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml