I've got CentOS up and running on my hp pavilion laptop. There wasn't enough space on the internal hard drive to shrink the NTFS partition and install CentOS there, and I didn't want to go through the exercise of copying everything to a new larger internal drive until I knew 5 was going to work, so it's installed on an external USB drive -- except for /boot which had to be on the internal drive in order for grub to properly dual-boot XP and CentOS.
Now the thought occurs to me: Is there some way I can easily carry this external drive to another machine, plug it in, and boot up the same CentOS installation? There are two constraints: (1) There is no /boot on this drive, so I have to re-create that, and (2) I don't want to have the /etc configuration that works with my laptop destroyed by whatever kudzu finds on any other machine I might plug in to, so I need a separate /etc.
Which leads to my question: Can I somehow: * copy /boot and /etc onto separate partitions on either this USB drive or a thumb drive [let's say a thumb drive for clarity in the rest of this paragraph], and * re-run grub to install a boot loader on the thumb drive, such that * the end result is that when I boot the laptop from the internal disk with the CentOS USB plugged in, I get exactly what I have now, but * when I boot from the thumb I get the root from the CentOS USB with the thumb /boot and /etc mounted over it?
Kudzu could thus do whatever it needs to for the current hardware in the thumb /etc, without changing the original /etc, but everything else would be exactly as it is when I boot the laptop.
Is there any chance at all this will work? I assume to change the boot device and reassign the /boot and /etc mount points I'll have to boot from the rescue CD. I've never done a grub reinstall by hand before (always used lilo in the past) so I'd appreciate pointers to the specifics of doing that for CentOS 5.