Creating bootable XP on USB hard drive

[Jono]

I'm sure I read about someone that had written/found a guide on how to create an installation of windows on a USB hard drive that you could boot directly to.

Did a quickish search and can't seem to find the thread.
Anyone got any ideas on what I could be thinking about. It's not just a usb memory stick - can't be anyway, because I don't have a big enough one - max is 2gb, though I do have a 30gb USB hard drive lying around.

What I want to be able to do, and i'm sure this is possible, is have a portable version of windows that could be taken to anywhere, and provided the system could boot from USB, it would do that.

Involved a lot of hacking around with cab files etc. iirc.

cheers

 

[wesley]

make image of your windows to USB external hard drive then change the BIOS to boot from USB hard drive. dunno if it'll work, just an idea lol

 

[Jonny69]

I've installed XP on a 1Gb hard disk so space isn't an issue. You need to set the USB drive as a bootable drive, which you can do on most motherboards now and technically it should install as normal.

Th only problem is that XP addresses the disk very often and performs huge numbers of writes and re-writes every time you boot. Flash memory has a finite number or read/write actions and then it dies so don't expect it to last very long.

 

[Jono]

I'm certain there was an article someone posted where a hard disk was used, connected via USB.

 

[wizardmaxx]

Why not build a bart pe os and load that onto your external device.

"Bart's PE Builder helps you build a "BartPE" (Bart Preinstalled Environment) bootable Windows CD-Rom or DVD from the original Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 installation/setup CD, very suitable for PC maintenance tasks.

It will give you a complete Win32 environment with network support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files to a network share, virus scan and so on.
This will replace any Dos bootdisk in no time!"

 

[attman]

WinXP on a USB......

Here