Re: Booting XP from external USB drive - change C drive?


"Olivier" <oliviersaurin@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:O8cJyR1UHHA.3652@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
: 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


"Ron Sommer" <rsommer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ucigID2UHHA.920@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
An operating system gives drives drive letters.
Usually the active drive gets the operating system installed on it and
becomes C.
The operating system on the laptop is on C and the operating system on
the
USB drive is on C.
The boot.ini file uses disk and partition numbers to determine which
partition to boot.

How are you switching the drive boot order to choose between the USB and
the
laptop drives?
--
Ronald Sommer


"Olivier" <oliviersaurin@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OaWV5p2UHHA.4076@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I expected the operating system on the USB drive to end up being on C, but
it's not. The internal drive remains C with the 'works' Windows XP and the
USB drive remains E.

To boot from the USB disk I changed the boot device order in the BIOS
setting to boot from USB before booting from internal disk. In other words
to boot from the USB drive I connect it before powering on and to boot
from the internal drive I power on without the USB drive connected. Or a
least that was the idea.

I'm after another way of doing it which would allow me to have two
separate working environments so that I can experiment with the 'home'
(USB) drive we've never been able to boot an XP OS from a USB/Firewire
EHD. And, I might add, we've never come across a single confirmed &
documented report where this capability was achieved and was without
consequence on the work (internal) drive.


Olivier:
Over the years there have been many newsgroup contributors and others who
have claimed to have booted the XP OS from a USB external HDD. Usually their
claim is couched in phrases like "as long as the motherboard's BIOS supports
this capability", or some such. All I can say is that we've worked with a
large variety of motherboards that presumably provided this "capability" but
we've never been able to boot an XP OS from a USB/Firewire EHD. And, I might
add, we've never come across a single confirmed & documented report where
this capability was achieved and was repeatable.

Having said this, you might want to take a look at this fairly recent Fred
Langa article where Fred purports to have come up with a process to achieve
this "bootability". See
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticleSrc.jhtml?articleID=177102101

Also, a poster to one of the MS XP newsgroups claimed that he too has come
up with a methodology to do this as well. See
http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

No doubt a Google search will also reveal a good deal of information on this
issue.

I really don't know any practical way to meet your objective. We have
experimented with a few eSATA (external) laptop CardBus adapters so as to
make a direct SATA-to-SATA connection from a SATA external enclosure to the
laptop's CardBus slot, but we've not be able to effect a boot using those
devices as well.

It has puzzled us why laptop/notebook manufacturers have not (at least up
the present time) produced their wares with an eSATA port, along with the
usual USB port. To our mind this would be an enormous leap forward since it
would provide the capability you and many others are looking for when using
a laptop/notebook. (A few desktop machines are finally coming on market with
at least one eSATA port). BTW, we have heard that ASUS will shortly be
releasing a notebook with an eSATA port.
Anna


.

Relevant Pages

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