Booting XP from external USB drive - change C drive?

What I want to do is: Boot my laptop from an external drive so that I have a
completely different Windows installation when I boot from the USB drive
than when I boot from the internal drive. The reason is that this is a work
laptop and I want to be able to keep work and personal things separate so I
could reboot on the USB drive after office hours and get my own system.

I have done everything that needed doing to copy my current partition from
the C drive to the USB drive and this is bootable. I expected somehow that
if I booted from the external drive it would become the primary drive, but
obviously not. So what happens is that it starts booting from the USB drive
and very quickly its registry tells it to start programs from C: so I don't
end up with a different system at all!

I am wondering if it is possible to assign drive C to another letter and
then the USB drive to drive C early enough in the boot process. How would
you go about it?

Thanks in advance

Olivier


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