Boot from an external hard drive

[MorrisMonkey]

Apologies if this has been solved elsewhere.

I have been playing with Linux for a few years but I am now trying to switch to using Linux as my main operating system.

Last week I put Linux Mint 14 with Cinnamon as a clean installation onto a new 500gb hard drive on my laptop. Everything is going well except for problems in getting the wireless to connect, if I reset the router it connects .

I have 2 hard disks for the laptop, one with Linux Mint 14 and the other the old one with Windows XP, and I can swap the hard drives if I need to, but..

I bought a hard disk caddy, so the idea was, the Linux hard drive would be inside the laptop, and I could use Linux for 90% of the time and then boot into the Windows XP through a boot off a usb connection if I need Windows.

Well it did not work, Windows started, and then crashed.

Let us swap everything around:
Windows XP on the hard drive in the laptop and the Linux hard drive in the usb caddy, well of course Linux being so good it worked and I am sending this message from the laptop running off the usb hard drive with no problems, I can see the internal windows hard drive , everything is good, but I don't want it this way round.

Does anyone know if it is likely that I could get it working so that Linux is the main operating system iinside the laptop and than I occasionally boot Windows off the the external usb.

I guess I could do dual booting, but I do not want to contaminate my Linux setup with Windows.

[usbtux]

windows cannot be run from a usb drive (I have tried to do it my self) - poor design my microsoft

[MorrisMonkey]

Thanks for the information it saves me wasting time trying.