I am thinking of instaling FC5 on a spare 20 GB USB drive. I have read that vaio's are compatible with FC5.

My intention is to learn a bit of shell scripting...be more friendly with linux commands...etc...and use to avoid a corporate junk forced onto me. (sony doesnt/or didnt sell VAIO without windows xp pro)

The main question i have in my mind is will the linux instalation mess up anything on my main disk?

What i want to be able to do is choose from the BIOS wether i want to boot from the USB disk(FC5) or the internal HDD(windows xp pro).

I need to be able to mount the internal disk while on linux copy stuff.

My main concern is messing up my current windows instalation untill i am sure about linux. I may play around some distributions in the begining.

Any pointers?

i just checked my notebooks BIOS. There is no way to boot directly from a USB drive.

Is there a way to make a custom bootloader on a CDROM which would allow me to boot from the USB drive?

A friend told me id need a small USB compatible linux kernal on a bootable CD which would load the USB disk and boot from it then?

well...couldnt get the solution after googling for hours....what i did was free up disk space...resize partation and load FC5. its up and runing and im very happy....

the power icon even tells me the battery status of my logitech wireless keyboard...amazing....

the yum updates takes too long to update all packages to the latest its about 500 MB download....!

are there any local(in thailand/asia) repositories? If so how do i add them?

Nectec has some Linux repositories. Perhaps this is the one you are looking for:

ftp://ftp.nectec.or.th/pub/linux-distribu.../Fedora/core/5/

Good luck.