Boot windowsxp from external firewire enclosure

[Oligau]

I have a Sony Vaio PCG-V505 laptop.(Celeron 1.8 *NOT* M, so small cache)
It has a 40gb internal harddrive with a dirty windowsxp (school
projects). I bought a external usb2.0 & firewire enclosure and have put
one 5400rpm 120gb harddrive. I think (not sure) that i can boot off it
with usb2.0? What i really want to do is to boot off firewire to
perserve my 2 usb controller for time-critical devices (asio soundcard,
keyboard, mouse). I also think that firewire is speedier because i
doesn't load the processor while it's transfering.

N.b.: I'm mixing with my laptop using Traktor Dj Studio 3. Really
demanding application on the ram memory. To load tracks, I need the
fastest storage, so i've long checked out to load the other half of mp4
collection of my friend's laptop.


N.b.2: I know that with a linux kernel i could just do a live switch
between internal and external files for kernel (Like in knoppix cheat
code bootfrom=/dev/sda99999). But i can't i need to keep fat32 on the
firewire and Traktor is an Windows or mac OSX application. I don't think
wine has such a good asio or directsound emulation.

-olivier, thank you all if you can elude my question that google haven't
answered.

 

[Guest]

I have a Sony Vaio PCG-V505 laptop.(Celeron 1.8 *NOT* M, so small cache)
It has a 40gb internal harddrive with a dirty windowsxp (school
projects). I bought a external usb2.0 & firewire enclosure and have put
one 5400rpm 120gb harddrive. I think (not sure) that i can boot off it
with usb2.0?

Yes it will boot off an USB drive *if* BIOS supports this, but then
XP will fail to start. XP is not designed to boot from USB drives
(at least without massive unsupported hacks).

What i really want to do is to boot off firewire to
perserve my 2 usb controller for time-critical devices (asio soundcard,
keyboard, mouse). I also think that firewire is speedier because i
doesn't load the processor while it's transfering.

May be this will work if you manage to install XP on the firewire drive
( so the drive letter of the OS partition won't change after setup, etc).

N.b.2: I know that with a linux kernel i could just do a live switch
between internal and external files for kernel (Like in knoppix cheat
code bootfrom=/dev/sda99999).

Certain Windows versions also can boot from USB and CD and
use RAM drives, but XP is not among them.

Good luck,
--PA