Well the main thing you have too look for is if the motherboard supports booting from USB, if not then he will have no luck in booting to USB. But if you can boot it would be good for taking to someones place that has cable/dsl and getting updates and such, is he wanting to put a type of linux on this drive and boot to it right or no? I'm not sure how a linux distro will handle the hardware changes like that haven't messed with that part.

Thanks,

Jonathan