Booting windows form usb external HD

[lemonkettaz]

How do i do this?

My friends laptops main hdd has died for some reason and i was wondering if he can boot windows from his external hdd and bypass the main drive inbuilt?

is this as simple as changing the boot settings in bios... and installing a fresh windows copy straight on his external hdd..

or is there complications? (which is probably the case)

 

[Tony Williams]

Um, goto the BIOS and look at the boot order they're should be a misc device thing there. Apart from that it should be fairly painless.

 

[Jonny69]

Or less hassle might be to boot using a live Linux CD like Knoppix and copy everything off from there. Saves having to install XP on the USB drive anyway.

 

[this_is_gav]

Vista refuses to install on a USB drive, but I assume XP is more tolerable, and indeed can't actually tell the difference until later on down the install process.

 

[Burnsy2023]

There will be a preformance loss, which could be quite severve. You'll have no DMA access and a lot slower bus which is not dedicated to the HDD.

I would suggest just getting a replacement HDD

Burnsy

 

[Energize]

A lot of hdds don't reach usb 2's 480Mb/s so I don't see bus speed having a huge impact. I don't see it as a problem for a temporary solution.

 

[LostCorpse]

I know i'm late but i was looking for this article when i first saw the post :
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-6346-5928902.html
just found it.