Boot XP from a USB disk

[TomT]

I've installed XP Pro (64-bit but it should work the same) onto a 40GB
IDE Hard Disk and it's working well.

I have a spare USB IDE Hard Disk bay, If I put the hard disk into that
would I be able to boot XP from it ?

My PC supports booting from USB Devices, I just don't want to corrupt
the XP installation !!

Any ideas / advice

Thanks

Tomt

 

[R. McCarty]

Somewhat complicated topic. You cannot install XP onto a USB drive.
XP is designed to prevent installation to a drive marked as "Removable".
However, some folks have reportedly had success in taking a full XP
instance and imaging/cloning that to a USB drive and have that unit be
bootable. Contrary to the "Rated Specifications" of USB-2 having a
throughput of 480 Megabytes, in real-world situations it is more like a
sustained rate of around 25 Megabytes. Even if you could get a USB
drive to become a bootable media, the performance would not be good.
It's probably more effective to have a USB drive hold an Image or a
backup, than use it to actually boot the PC.

 

[TomT]

Somewhat complicated topic. You cannot install XP onto a USB drive.
XP is designed to prevent installation to a drive marked as "Removable".
However, some folks have reportedly had success in taking a full XP
instance and imaging/cloning that to a USB drive and have that unit be
bootable. Contrary to the "Rated Specifications" of USB-2 having a
throughput of 480 Megabytes, in real-world situations it is more like a
sustained rate of around 25 Megabytes. Even if you could get a USB
drive to become a bootable media, the performance would not be good.
It's probably more effective to have a USB drive hold an Image or a
backup, than use it to actually boot the PC.

Ahh...

Thanks

 

[Plato]

I've installed XP Pro (64-bit but it should work the same) onto a 40GB
IDE Hard Disk and it's working well.

I have a spare USB IDE Hard Disk bay, If I put the hard disk into that
would I be able to boot XP from it ?

In theory, one cannot boot XP from an external drive. In practice, it's
possible if you do the research and tweaks.