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Install WinXP on USB Hard Drive

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Max001

New Member
Joined
Mar 3, 2005
Location
Johannesburg South Africa
I have Dell D610 Laptop running XP home and would like to load Win XP Pro on a separate USB hard drive. Have latest Bios installed which will allow USB 1st boot order. Any ideas on how to do this. Tks
 
Max001 said:
I have Dell D610 Laptop running XP home and would like to load Win XP Pro on a separate USB hard drive. Have latest Bios installed which will allow USB 1st boot order. Any ideas on how to do this. Tks

I'm not actually sure if it can be done. Mind you, I've been trying to install on a USB flash drive. The only thing I can think of, is that if you can boot from the USB drive. Install regularly on your internal HDD, then clone the install to the USB drive. I've never tried it this way but, in theory, it should work.
 
I've always wanted to do this with a usb memory stick, especially one of those new dual channel ones. The cloning idea sounds like it should work.

Let us know what happens if you do this.
 
I was installing XP at one time and happened to have a firewire hdd hooked up. Windows saw it at the same time as the internal drive so it's at least possible for firewire. I think the big thing is getting the drive to boot off of firewire/usb, which means a bios that supports such a thing.
 
Well, a problem with using Windows XP on a USB Device is that whenver a new USB device is plugged in, XP reloads all of it's current USB Devices. Sooo, you boot, it detects the printer/other device connected, and XP loses it's root partition. BANG blue screen.

BartPE I believe has a workaround for this. goto http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10806

Try that. :)
 
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