[COLUG] OpenSUSE 11 on External Hard Drive

[Stephen P. Molnar]

This message could be subtitled 'a little bit of knowledge cause a disaster!'

I have a reasonably new laptop running (ugh) Windows Vista Home Premium. I 
attempted to put OpenSUSW 11 on an external hard drive.  Actually, I 
succeeded in installing the linux OS.  Unfortunately, this destroyed (or at 
least corrupted) the MBR.  Consequently, while I could boot the machine in 
linux but not Vista.  Now, losing vista would not be a bad thing, except for 
the fact that I use the laptop for some tasks at work.

I ended up having to purchase a recovery disk from HP as I couldn't find the 
disk I made when I bought the laptop.  That involved multiple calls to idiots 
on the Indian subcontinent, but that's another tale of woe.  It only took me 
about a week to restore vista on the laptop

In my study I have a tower booting OpenSUSE 10.3.  It finds the external 
drive:

/dev/sde2	ext3	/media/disk
/dev/sde3	ext3	/media/disk-1

After this rather long preamble, my question is the following.  Is there a 
SAFE (defined as not destroying access to the OpenSUSE 10.3) way to boot the 
machine in OpenSUSE 11.0?

Thanks in advance.

 
--
Stephen P. Molnar, Ph.D.		Life is a fuzzy set
Foundation for Chemistry		Stochastic and multivariate
http://www.geocities.com/FoundationForChemistry