Intalling Windows XP on an external USB HD

[Guest]

I need to install WXPPro on an external USB HD (Lacie Pocket Drive, 30Gb)
connected to my Asus L5G laptop. Ineed to switch between OS versions for demo
pruposes.
The external HD has been partitioned and formated. 2 Primary partitions.
The HD is recognized by the Bios and appears in the HD list Windows setup is
showing when asking to select a partition where the installation should be
done. However Windows refuse to install on the selected external partition.
Is this normal? Is it impossible to install on an external drive? Windows
reports a problem similar to the one occuring when using a SCSI drive for
which you don't have the driver. But no driver is proposed for USB drive at
this stage... :-(

 

[Chris Priede]

I need to install WXPPro on an external USB HD (Lacie Pocket Drive,
30Gb) connected to my Asus L5G laptop. Ineed to switch between OS
versions for demo pruposes.

In short:

"Current versions of Windows should not be installed to USB hard disk drives
because Windows does not support USB hard disk drives as the primary boot
device."

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx

I have heard rumors of it working for some, by installing the appropriate
third party mass storage driver (F6 during Windows setup). If these rumors
are true, that would be highly vendor-specific and definitely not supported.

 

[Edward W. Thompson]

To save you repeating what I have already proven to my satisfaction,
you cannot install WINXP to a USB HDD from the WINXP CD or from the
fixed HDD. If it is at all possible to boot from a USB drive you
obviously must have a machine that specifically allows booting from a
USB-HDD. My machines does but it is not a laptop. I was not aware
that laptops allowed booting from a USB-HDD but perhaps recent
machines do.

What I haven't tried and that is cloning (Ghost, True Image BootitNg
et al) my WINXP installation on my fixed HDD and transferring that to
my USB drive. That might work. The other possibility is to mount the
drive in the USB enclosure as a fixed drive, load WINXP onto it then
remove it and reinstall it to the external USB enclosure.

I am interested in this purely for academic reasons. If you have any
success please post how you did it, I and others are interested.,

Good luck.