Booting XP after Copying Internal to USB External

[gregmercer]

HI,

I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 where I want to copy the internal c: drive
to an external USB SimpleTech portable drive.

I've used Norton "Save and Restore" to copy the c: drive onto the USB
drive and that seems to work fine. I choose the "set drive active" and
"copy mbr" options - which seemed like something I would need to do.

But when I change the bios to try to boot XP from the external USB
drive I get an error.

Has anyone been able to get this to work?

Thanks very much for your help,

Greg

 

[Bruce Chambers]

HI,

I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 where I want to copy the internal c: drive
to an external USB SimpleTech portable drive.

I've used Norton "Save and Restore" to copy the c: drive onto the USB
drive and that seems to work fine. I choose the "set drive active" and
"copy mbr" options - which seemed like something I would need to do.

But when I change the bios to try to boot XP from the external USB
drive I get an error.

Has anyone been able to get this to work?

Probably not. WinXP is specifically designed not to boot from external
devices, as part of its licensing protection.


--

Bruce Chambers

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[gregmercer]

Do you think if would be possible to copy the external USB disk back to
another internal drive and get it to boot?

Thanks,

Greg

 

[Bob Harris]

I have had good luck created partition "images" of C:, which contains XP and
programs, and restoring then to the same computer. That is not exactly the
same as a simple copy&paste, since the imaging process captures all files,
including those that would normally be locked when running XP. A parition
image does not normally include the master boot record; a disk image usually
does.

If you are interested in partition (or whole disk) images, look into Norton
GHOST and Acronis True Image. You might also want to look into other
related programs (some free) at:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads3.html

But, no matter how you do it, plan on restoring the image only to the
**same** PC. If you restore to a new PC (or a new motherboard) you will
need to (1) do a repair installation of XP, (2) re-activate XP. If you have
a retail license and thus a real XP CD, both of these are possible. If you
have an OEM license, or pre-installed XP without a CD, don't try this.

The XP license is intended to stick with a single physical PC, not migrate
frequently. The retail license can be moved, but Microsoft will start
wondering what you are doing, if you attempt this more than a few times per
year. The OEM license can not be moved.

If you want an operating system and programs that is portable, look into
some variation of LINUX. For example, KNOPPIX is free and comes as a
downloadable CD image and also as a downloadable DVD image. Both include
the operating system, plus some program, like Open Office, a browser, etc.
of course, the DVD version contains more programs. There are smaller LINUX
distirbutions that will fit on a pen drive, although even KNOPPIX could fit
on some of the larger pen drives available today. Link to KNOPPIX:

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Link to a list of small, free LINUX distributions:

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php