Installing on External

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Guest

Since it needs 15 gigs of space, I put it on my external and it does not boot
up. Is there a way to make it boot up?
 
Not if your external drive is a usb or firewire drive. I use an external
SATA enclosure cabled directly to the mobo via a passthrough connector in
the back of my pc. That is bootable.

If you are using a notebook computer that does not have an ExpressCard slot
then you cannot proceed.

If you are using a desktop computer and you assembled the external drive
unit yourself you should be able to move the drive from the enclosure and
mount it in your pc. Of course you can also purchase a drive for your pc.

If it is a factory sealed external drive and you cannot add an internal hard
drive to your computer then I suggest you simply wait for Vista final.
 
This topic comes up quite a bit on XP-General. The key to
"Bootablility" is how the disk appears to XP/Vista. Removable
is the main consideration, not external. SCSI & SATA can be
external but appear to XP/Vista as a "Fixed" drive, which infers
internal. So it's not external drives per say, but more how the
OS defines them. To XP/Vista all USB peripherals are seen as
a removable device as thus aren't a installable destination for
the OS.
 
Windows NT has always supported external drives on adapters with boot-time drivers.
That's SCSI, 1394 (with BIOS), and SATA, but not USB.
 
Windows Vista can only be installed on an internal hard drive,
not an external USB hard drive. External drives are designed
for backups and file storage only, not operating systems.

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

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:

| Since it needs 15 gigs of space, I put it on my external and it does not boot
| up. Is there a way to make it boot up?
 
It can boot from an external usb/firewire drives not just sata or esata
like others are suggesting.

Option #1, Go into your bios and check boot order and see if
usb/firewire drive is listed. If so put it above your main hard drive in
the priority list. If it is not, you may want to try option #2.

Option #2, This is a little more tricky. If your computer does not
support usb/firewire drive booting, then you can use a boot manager that
does support external drives. This is just one more step before Vista
will boot. Just google "grub usb hard drive". This is one of many boot
managers that can boot a usb/fireware drive.

The second option is very tricky, and mostly used by POSIX geeks like me.

-Luke
 
The problem isn't will it install; the problem is how to get his
computer to boot from it.

-Luke
 
I'm tired of hearing this statement.

A more accurate statement would be:

Windows Vista can only be installed on an internal drive because the
developers did not properly plan for or implement booting from external
drives. External drives are, of course, perfectly appropriate for Operating
systems, but the limitations of Vista do not allow them.

It is completely and utterly ridiculous to state that external drives are
designed only for file storage. Anyone that has been in the IT industry
since it was called DP knows better.

Tom
 
Colin,

I am not denying that you are running from an sata enclosure. What I'm
suggesting is IF he managed to install it on an usb hard drive like he's
claiming, then he has options to boot from it.

Secondly, like other people have mentioned in this same thread, sata and
scsi drives are treated like they are internal drives regardless of
location to the rest of the computer.

-Luke
 
I know. But the stream of comments here that booting from an external drive
cannot be done is simply not accurate. USB and firewire are out, but not
because they are external. My machine wouldn't boot off of one if the drive
were interfaced with one of the internal usb or firewire connectors either.

The OP has a creative idea and he should explore it. My point is that the
OP never said anything about what kind of drive and everyone just jumped in
assuming he meant USB because a lot of people use them. But he might not
have been talking about USB at all. He didn't specify. He might have been
looking for ideas on how to avoid partitioning his internal drive or
overwriting his OS.

I have been booting off of SATA drives externally all the way through the
TechBeta program and don't think of "external" as necessarily equating to
"USB." Now I have come across a solution for some laptops using an
ExpressCard/34 slot interface which has the potential to make it much easier
for laptop users to boot Vista without touching their internal drives. It
depends on how the machine would support that since having to use a third
party driver would be a problem.

If we can find ways to help the new testers keep from feeling they have to
overwrite their XP drives just to look at Vista, so much the better for them
and us.
 
Colin,

I'm not trying to start some flame thread here, just stating the facts.

"caleb wrote:
Since it needs 15 gigs of space, I put it on my external and it does not
boot up. Is there a way to make it boot up?"

From the original post, I would assume Caleb:

1) had already installed it on some type of external hard drive
(usb/firewire/nas)
2) since he had installed on an external drive, his computer should be
more than compatible for recognizing and booting from an external drive
outside the windows environment via the bios.
3) needs to find a way to boot from this drive.

To tackle the original problem, Caleb's must have recognized the drive
outside windows for it to have installed on to it from the Vista install
process. He needs to check the boot order in his bios first. If that
fails, he needs to consider a boot manager program like GRUB that can
boot from other types of interfaces.

I originally omitted nas drives from the list of possible only because
many people do not even know they exist nor know how to interface with
them in windows let alone from a boot manager.

I appreciate what you and others are suggesting; however that is not
what Caleb asked.

-Luke
 
I didn't go on an assumption about the type of Caleb's drive connection.
That's my whole point.
 
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