Booting linux off of brand new 40 gig portable hd.

I wanna do it, im not 100% clear on how to though. I just bought a Seagate 40 gig portable hd with some spare cash i had, and one of my classes got my curiosity in linux. so i decided to spend like the 5 bucks to order a copy of knoppix, and what i was hoping i could do was figure out a way to either boot linux off my new hd, or run windows off my main hd. I haven't installed knoppix on the hd yet, and im not sure if im that linux savvy to do that yet. I also dont know how to reach my bios startup screen. Toshiba must hide it, so i dont know if I can even boot from a usb drive, but im assuming i can. If anyone has ever tried this before or knows pretty much what to do and wouldnt mind taking a second to send me in the right direction, id really appreciate it. Thanks - TJM

You can run knoppix from a cd and press F1 to see if that gets you into the bios

In my experience, you usually get to BIOS by pressing delete or F10 or sometimes F1 or F2. Doing it at just the right time can be important on some machines. I have a 1.3GHz box where I have 50% chance of getting to BIOS, otherwise I reset and try again. Try booting to Knoppix and see if the external drive is found. The biggest problem is in the Linux kernel recognizing the usb port, as opposed to using a kernel module or driver to recognize it. But Knoppix is great, and easy to install on a hard drive.