Can you boot from Firewire or eSata?

I wanted to know if its possible to boot from Firewire or eSata. Reason being is that I deal with Adobe products, games, etc, but Im getting a laptop. Nuf said. So my idea to help remedy this is to get PCMCIA card with either eSata or Firewire and maybe get a Raptor and a good enclosure.

If I cannot boot, my other option is using VMWare, but a friend is strongly advising agaisnt it because he says the speed is horrible, I would imagine he has a point.

The other option is to boot the OS and then just run my apps and games from the eSata/Firewire. Would you guys recommend this approach.

Also, I am a bit skeptical on the whole eSata vs. Firewire 800. I mean, Sata's 3.0GBs isnt realistic, and a Firewires supposed 800 Mbps should be more than enough for a Rapto 74GB, maybe a little too less for a 150GB. Reason I ask is that I think it might be more plausible to load from Firewire. But if I can load from eSata, better yet.

You can boot from a USB external drive, so why not eSATA? You just have to look in your bios and specify the boot device order.

eSATA is faster than firewire or USB 2.0, so it's the better choice. Seagate has a couple at Newegg that look good, a 300 and a 500 gig.

I wondered about that myself, but I've seen people have different installs of the same OS, so I figured he had a reason for it. Looks like he just wants room for the apps so he can use the laptop in a docking station.

Thanks to everyone for helping me out.

The main purpose of this is based on performance, and I will not be swapping it.

I plan on going with a C2D 2.0GHz and 2GBs of RAM, and the HD is just going to be a bottleneck. I really want to not make it one so hence my idea.

Where could I check BIOS settings of new motherboards to check if they can boot from eSata or something?

it may not say e-sata specifically in the bios settings, if e-sata is supported... it may say scsi, or try other boot devices, or similar to that, when youre selecting the boot order of devices (floppy, cdrom, hdd, etc)

well, without a bios update, im not sure itll even show the e-sata interface specifically as an option to boot from... what it might show however (if e-sata is even supported on the particular laptop), is another bootable option (sata/scsi/other bootable device), that might allow booting from the e-sata drive... but, i honestly cant say for sure, it really depends on the manufacturer of the laptop, and what they list as specifically supported/unsupported

well, and they probably have forums on their site too, and you can probably ask members who may be able to help you specifically about different things, who may own the laptop themselves