installing windows xp in external hard drive

W

wannabegeek

is it possible to install windows xp in external hard drive and make works
normally
as it was install in internal hard drive

please help i am new at this
 
R

R. McCarty

Only if the external drives are either SATA or SCSI hosted.
All USB peripherals are seen to Windows as removable. It's
that attribute that prevents installation on USB external drives.
 
J

John

Really? I've always thought that if we can boot off USB flash drive we
should be able to install Windows on external USB drive (as long as BIOS
supports booting off USB). Maybe I'm wrong.
 
R

R. McCarty

Some claim you can clone a working XP image onto a USB drive.
However, XP's installer will never recognize a USB drive as a
possible destination for installing. SATA, eSATA and SCSI drives
in an external enclosure appear to XP as "Fixed" drives and are
candidates for installing to. It's not that the drives are external so
much as to XP they appear "Removable".
 
J

John

Good to know. Thanks.

R. McCarty said:
Some claim you can clone a working XP image onto a USB drive.
However, XP's installer will never recognize a USB drive as a
possible destination for installing. SATA, eSATA and SCSI drives
in an external enclosure appear to XP as "Fixed" drives and are
candidates for installing to. It's not that the drives are external so
much as to XP they appear "Removable".
Click to expand...
 
B

Bob I

Only if you "whack" the ability of Windows to handle USB normally. In
other words you prevent the normal Plug and play of USB and then the
external booting can be used. So you give up a lot of USB's value for
something of limited use.
 
T

Twayne

is it possible to install windows xp in external hard drive and make
works normally
as it was install in internal hard drive

please help i am new at this
Click to expand...

Only if there is a BIOS setting where you can tell it to boot from an
external drive and the type of connection it uses: eg USB.
 
T

Timothy Daniels

By "whack", I believe you mean choosing the option in the BIOS at
startup to boot from USB media. That "whack" would last only until
the next startup. That a USB-linked IDE or SATA hard drive could
boot an OS was confirmed to me by Dell's Tech Support, so I assume
that any motherboard with a BIOS that enables booting from USB
media would also accommodate booting from a USB-connected
external hard drive. But it's not clear that setting the BIOS to boot
from USB would disable unused USB ports from use for plug-n-play
devices. Do you know this to be a fact?

*TimDaniels*
 
J

John John (MVP)

Windows will not install and boot on a USB drive unless you hack the
installation. If you do some searching on the net you will find reports
of some who have attempted to do this and the reports are mostly ones of
failures or of less than spectacular results. To get this to work you
have to change the way that Windows initializes the USB stack, a main
problem being that the Session Manager creates the pagefile before the
USB stack is fully initialized. It's an installation that isn't
supported by Microsoft, but as I said, if you search the net you will
find reports from some who claim to have done it along with their
installation recipe.

John
 
T

Timothy Daniels

How about if one installed the OS to an internal hard drive and then
cloned it to an external USB hard drive, or if the internal hard drive
were merely physically moved to the external USB drive enclosure?
IOW, if one separated the installation and bootup procedures - could
the OS on the external USB hard drive be booted without a "whack"?

*TimDaniels*
 
B

Bob I

No, you will need to break, modify, hack or alter (whack) Windows so
that it can no longer handle USB storage as a removable drive. In other
words what you are doing is making it appear to Windows that the USB
attached drive you want to boot from is really an internal drive. BUT
that prevents you from using any other USB attached storage work
normally. And the purpose of booting from the external drive would be?
You can't move from system to system unless they were darn near
identical systems. And if it was for security purposes, say locking up
the harddrive in a safe at night to prevent theft of intellectual
property, well a SATA, SCSI or IDE drive caddy or laptop drive is way
more convenient and doesn't require hacking the operating system.
 
J

John John (MVP)

No, that won't work, you still need to change the way the USB stack is
initialized.

John
 
T

Timothy Daniels

Interesting. The Dell "Level II" tech reps insisted that their systems
that could boot from USB "devices" could boot from USB hard drives.
But they didn't say *how* to boot them from a USB hard drive. It
appears now that they were saying "if you hack the OS in one of our
USB-bootable systems (and thus void the warranty), the system can
be booted from a USB hard drive".

Does this mean that if one sets the BIOS to boot from a USB RAM
stick that one cannot use USB for a plug-n-play device while that
setting is in effect?

*TimDaniels*
 
J

John John (MVP)

You can boot from a USB "device". You can boot on a USB floppy or a USB
CD-ROM and install Windows to another non-USB hard disk when you boot
with another device, but at the present time you cannot install any
Windows desktop/server version to a USB hard disk without hacking the
installation files and hacking the way Windows boots and
loads/initializes the USB drivers. You may be able to install and boot
other operating systems to a USB drive but this is not supported out of
the box for Microsoft desktop/server operating systems, Microsoft does
not support this boot method.

As for the RAM stick question I think it would still be able to boot the
computer and that you could use the USB drive, you can boot a PE version
on a USB stick, the difference is that when you boot with the RAM stick
you don't need to retrieve and write files to the USB hard disk while
the computer is booting, once the OS on the stick is loaded if it has
USB drivers then it should be able to read write to the USB hard drive.
You should be able to find information about that on Bart's PE site
and user forums, or on the Ultimate Boot Disks for Windows site.

You can get a idea of what needs to be done to install and boot Windows
on a USB drive here: http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

As Bob mentioned in his post, unless someone has very specific needs I
don't much see the use of this booting method, not to mention that USB
drives are about the slowest hard drives available, performance wise not
the best for the operating system.

John
 
B

Bob I

No the BIOS boot setting has nothing to with the Plug and Play feature
of Windows. WINDOWS CAN'T BE BOOTED AND RUN FROM A REMOVABLE DRIVE. You
CAN boot from some OTHER operating system on a removable drive and use
USB drives normally. JUST NOT WINDOWS. (caps for emphasis)
 
T

Timothy Daniels

Thanks for that explanation, John. As I understand it, then, only
the data files could be *practically* kept on the USB hard drive,
and the installed application programs themselves would have to
be part of the BartPE OS on the RAM stck. True?

*TimDaniels*
 
J

John John (MVP)

I don't have tons of experience with this but that is the way I
understand it. Unless they are small self executing programs I don't
know how they would run off the USB hard drive. No doubt the folks on
Bart's user forums would be able to provide more information on the subject.

John
 

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