Boot windows from external USB2 / Firewire HD

[J.Clarke]

Is it possible to install windows xp onto an external HD then boot off
it? It you cant directly, then how about booting from a floppy which
can then tell the system to goto external hd and load windows???

Please tell as i dont wanna waste my money buying the drive and find
out i cant cheers!

If your system does not have a BIOS option to boot from a USB or
Firewire drive then you won't be able to boot XP off of one. If the
drive is supported in the BIOS and can be accessed from DOS without a
driver then it _might_ be possible to make a boot diskette that
transfers control to the external disk but I've not heard of that ever
being done with XP.

In other words whether this can be done depends on the particular
capabilities of the machine that you are using, but in general you're
not going to find the capability to boot from USB or Firewire on any but
the newest hardware and you're going to find it on precious little of
that.

 

[Andre]

Is it possible to install windows xp onto an external HD then boot off it?
It you cant directly, then how about booting from a floppy which can then
tell the system to goto external hd and load windows???

Please tell as i dont wanna waste my money buying the drive and find out i
cant cheers!

 

[Alexander Grigoriev]

It was told in MS newsgroups by MS folks, boot device driver requires
special code to support switch from BIOS to the driver and to support paging
file/hiberfile operations, but neither USB nor IEEE1394 drivers contain it.
External SATA drive may work, though.

 

[Alexander Grigoriev]

One more clarification: as long as an OS doesn't grab USB controller from
legacy-emulation BIOS, it will work. MSDOS is likely to boot, and possibly
Windows 95, but nothing more.

It was told in MS newsgroups by MS folks, boot device driver requires
special code to support switch from BIOS to the driver and to support paging
file/hiberfile operations, but neither USB nor IEEE1394 drivers contain it.
External SATA drive may work, though.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

One more clarification:

Bwah, you shouldn't have done that!

as long as an OS doesn't grab USB controller from legacy-emulation BIOS, it
will work. MSDOS is likely to boot, and possibly Windows 95, but nothing more.

I thought I understood your previous explanation, now I
haven't got a clue what you were actually talking about.
Are you hinting at MS-DOS compatibility mode?