Re: Bootable USB HDD

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: Nathan McNulty (nospam_at_msn.com)
Date: 07/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 01:00:32 -0700

Just a note. You MUST have a BIOS that supports External USB Storage
Devices. If you have an Intel i865 or i875 Chipset, you can boot from
external USB Storage devices without any extra effort. Most of this is
trying to figure out a way to workaround the BIOS if your motherboard
doesn't support this. 

----
Nathan McNulty
Edward W. Thompson wrote:
> I am posting my experience in making an external USB HDD bootable as an aide
> to others who may be having the same problem. My OS is WINXP Pro formatted
> NTFS and the external drive is formatted FAT32.
> 
> I have an external usb/firewire enclosure in which is housed an IBM DJSA 230
> 2.5" HDD.  I have been using this setup for about a year to store backups
> and the like.  I used the system on both my desktop (USB 2.0) and laptop
> (firewire).
> 
> I upgraded my desktop to a system that has a motherboard that allows booting
> from a USB HDD.  I then tried to make my external enclosure bootable and ran
> into complications.
> 
> Initially I simply transferred (sys) DOS ver 7.0 OS onto the external HDD
> (FAT32), made the drive active in WINXP, changed the boot order in the
> desktop BIOS and tried to boot.  The boot process hung, although the
> external drive was recognised.  I then booted to DOS via a floppy and
> repartioned the drive using fdisk, making a single primary partition.  fdisk
> identified the external drive as Drive 3, I have two SATA drives on my
> desktop.  I formatted the partition and reloaded the OS (Sys c:) from my
> bootable floppy. So far so good.
> 
> I then tried to make the drive active, using fdisk and found that I couldn't
> as fdisk will only allow the first drive to be made active and the external
> drive is recognised as Drive 3.  So back to WINXP to make the drive active
> there (Control Panel->Admin Tools->Computer Management).  I changed the boot
> order back to USB-HDD first and tried to reboot.  The system again hung
> during the bootup as before.
> 
> For whatever reason I concluded the problem may be a MBR problem so I tried
> to recreate the MBR using fdisk /mbr.  Fortunately before I tried that I
> read that fdisk /mbr will only rewrite the mbr on the first drive in the
> system.  To rewrite the mbr for another drive (in my case drive 3) I either
> had to disconnect my two SATA fixed drives (which would make the external
> drive, drive 1) or find an alternative to fdisk.  By searching Google I
> found the symantec gdisk.exe, bundled with Ghost, will allow rewriting mbr
> on disks other that the first. gdisk used to be available as freeware but
> not anymore.  Fortunately I was able to download an old copy of the gdisk
> freeware version from a site by searching using Google.  I recreated mbr
> (gdisk 3 /mbr) and the machine now boots from the external drive without
> problems.
> 
> I believe my experience only relates to previously used HDD.  If a new drive
> is partitioned using fdisk anew mbr is created however when an old drive is
> repartitioned fdisk does not recreate the mbr.  Why the mbr was the source
> of ther proble, I have no idea.  I don't have that level of knowledge, but
> my experience suggests that if anyone is trying to make a previously used
> HDD bootable via an external enclosure, re creating the drive mbr will be
> required.
> 
> Before I embarked on this 'enterprise' I did look up as many references as I
> could find on what was entailed to make an external usb drive bootable and
> all my references suggested using fdisk, which for me gave problems, and
> none indicated that recreating the mbr will/may be required.
> 
> Hope this may be of assistance to others.
> 
>

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