Bitcoin storage ideas

I have been looking into how people secure their bitcoins and cold storage seems to be very popular for coins that you aren't going to use for awhile. The most popular option seems to be make a linux offline computer and keep your wallets there as well as other offline places such as a flash drive, and use that computer to print your paper wallet. Then when you need to go "hot" and send your coins somewhere you just connect that computer to the internet for a few minutes and do the transaction.

I don't really want to buy a whole new computer so I was wondering what y'all think about these two ideas because I don't see them very often.

My first idea is to use an external hard drive and put linux on it, encrypt the hard drive and store my wallets onto it. Whenever I would need to access these coins I would just unmount my hard drive with windows on it and mount my external hard drive so that I don't have to worry about malware. So it would be like having an offline computer almost. Is there a reason why people don't do this? Also would an eSATA be better than just a USB external hard drive?

Option two would be to partition my hard drive with windows on it dual boot linux in that partition. I believe I could still unmount the linux partition to keep it "cold". Would my linux partition be safe from any malware on my windows partition?

Is one of these options better than the other?

Thanks!