Help me please ....

Aliboy

Aliboy

Aliboy

Soldato
Joined
4 Jan 2004
Posts
3,200
Greetings peeps.

I'm really sorry for the noobie questions here but please bare with me as this is driving me mad. :o
I've bought an external hard drive that I would like to use for work only and use the one that is already installed internally for my usual pc guff and personal use. Can I install windows onto my external hard drive and all of the applications that I need for my work onto it and just plug it in when I need to? Also, are there any applications that can completely wipe any data from my external hard drive so that it reverts back to 'out of the box' state. Also, if anyone has any links that could show me a sort of step by step guide on how to do this then I'd be really grateful.
Thanks again folks :o

Al
 
Installing Windows onto and booting from the external might be a bit tricky, it depends on the connection to the PC and whether the system BIOS will suport it. The performance won't be great either, a USB2 drive will be roughly half the speed of an internal one.

Really need a few more details on the PC and the external disk to give an accurate assessment.
 
I like the idea :)

In general what you're talking about doing would be to start using a laptop where you carry everything around with you.

As pointed out above and external USB2 connected drive is much much slower then an internal drive and as to whether you could boot up of it, that would depend on the mobo that you connect it to.
 
Thanks for the replies lads ;)

The external drive is a WD My Book Premium ES (320gb). I need to get an esata connection for it though as I know that using a usb connection will slow things down.
My pc spec is an AMD Athlon 3700, 2GB RAM, stuck onto an Asus A8N SLI Premium motherboard.

Hope this helps

Al :)
 
If you can go with eSATA then this should be a go-er. eSATA drives are normally treated the same as internal SATA drives so it should be dead easy to get the system to boot from it.

I would go for an adapter that takes an internal port and routes it to the outside world, that way you know it'll definitely be bootable and you can easily change which drive you boot from with the main BIOS.

EDIT: Did you not get an adapter like that with the board?
 
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