Laptop HDD in a USB enclosure bootable?

I just bought a 40gb laptop HDD and put it into a 2.5" enclosure that converts it to USB.

What I want to know is: can I set that as the primary (and ONLY) device and boot from that. I need to setup winXP pro on it. Basically it's a carputer setup I'm working on. I went with the lappy drive for more longevity. I will run it on the via epia board just plugged into the USB port.

So, I have a lappy drive, in a 2.5USB enclosure. I plugged it into one of my current running machines and it did not detect it (win2000), but all the lights on the enclosure light up and the drive spins. What's up with that? How do I set it up to be able to load winXP on it? The bios has a setting to boot from USB HDD. Is that what I need even if it's blank right now? If I set to boot from CD rom, will it detect a USB drive?

TIA, I've never messed with laptop crap before.

Also, what should I have the jumper set to on the drive? I assume its cable select and then put it into the USB enclosure?

I would think it should boot from the USB drive (leave it as cable select, it shouldnt make a difference) if you tell it to in the BIOS. However windows XP setup may need drivers to access the drive.

EDIT: Misread the question, sorry.

Great, thanks David. The 2.5 enclosure is a Coolmax HD211. The packagine says that it only needs drivers to work with 98 - and they supplied a disk that works only with 98.

HOWEVER, I set the drive to CS, inserted it into the adaptor/enclosure and plugged it into the USB on my win2000 machine, and it's not being detected at all. I get lights for power, but no pop-up that says a new drive was found. What's up with that?

Running an OS from USB is a bad idea, even if you can get around potential mass storage driver issues, due to bandwidth concerns. USB 2.0 will be very slow for running an OS and the latency will be ver high. To load the OS, you'd need the mass storage driver for the USB controller on FDD and have luck with the OS accepting the configuration. A much easier and faster solution is to use a laptop HDD to IDE converter for around 10.00 and connect directly to the IDE channels.

By default, the drives are set as master, with no jumpers on the 4 pins that are separated from the main group. Try removing any jumpers from the drive and it should be recognized.

GREAT response there Xaotic, thank you. I will exchange the enclosure today for the 40-44 pin convertor. BTW, I bought a fujitsu 40gb 4500rpm 2mb buffer drive. Will that be REALLY slow?

4200 or 5400? They're both close in numeric RPM terms.

The 4200 RPM drives are slow by today's standards, but not unbearably so. They'll have seeks in the 15ms range and probably 9ms of disk latency. STRs will be in the 18-20MB/s range and generally handle most tasks fine.

The 5400 RPM drives are usually a tremendous improvement. Some have 8MB cache and typical seeks of 13ms with disk latency down to 7ms. STR is greatly improved and can be up to 36MB/s.

Either variety will typically be ATA-100 and the interface will not be a major bottleneck.

Alrighty, I swapped the USB for a 44-40 converter. That should solve the little boot problem. The HDD itself is 40gb 4200rpm 2mb buffer. Hope that's not DOG slow, but all it has to do is run a couple proggys and play MP3's.

It's not super slow, but it might feel it sometimes.

Just out of curiosity, may I ask why you bought a 40Gig laptop drive rather than, say, a 120Gig 3.5" drive that would've cost about the same or less, and be much faster. Especially as you're using it in a desktop, it just doesn't make sense to me

He'll be mounting the system in a car and needs the higher operational shock and vibration ratings from a laptop drive.

It should handle OS, MP3s and several other applications concurrently without any issues. The Fujitsu's have been rather good lately. I think the latest 4200 RPM series is the MHS with the 5400 RPM being MHT.

Ahh, that explains it then

Should work well and be plenty fast enough for something like this. A couple of my friends fitted PCs in their cars for music, GPS and other things. They've had no problems using regular desktop hard drives, but it never hurts to be too careful.

Great. I'm headed home to load an OS on it. I have yet to purchase the touchscreen LCD and dc-dc power supply but I wanted to get a head start on putting the guts together and finding ways to hide and mount it all and make it look good. I think the HDD will be fine, but we'll see when it gets some stuff on it. I'll try to post some pics of the progress, but will probly start a new thread.