Install Vista on USB external hard disk

Associate
Joined
23 Dec 2008
Posts
642
Fellas,

How big is the deal to do that? I've already done some research, Windows XP is possible. But I prefer to have Vista because it should be faster running games than XP despite both are 32 bits.

Can anyone shed some light on this one for me, thanks a million!

Peter
 
Not sure it is possible to do this. A quick search seems to confirm - the XP method is fairly involved and doesn't seem to translate to Vista / 7

Though why you would want to is a different matter - surely it would run like crap! :p

Why not just use an internal drive / partition?
 
Not sure it is possible to do this. A quick search seems to confirm - the XP method is fairly involved and doesn't seem to translate to Vista / 7

Though why you would want to is a different matter - surely it would run like crap! :p

Why not just use an internal drive / partition?
<Sigh!> It's a long story...anyway, thanks for the confirmation. I know there is some sort of registry edit after installing Vista on an "internal" drive first. Then it will be put onto the USB drive.

Well...the performance you're saying, today USB 2.0 is quite fast isn't it? It also depends how much the drive cost you. Same USB 2.0 but some write/read faster than other in relations to how much quids you pay.

I just wish to install WOP into the external USB drive without SteadyState protection and that drive will be used for that game only.
 
Possible but not worth it in any way, shape or form. Why would you want to so this anyway?

Oh and games from an external hard drive will run like poo
 
Ive got all my steam games on a 1TB external HDD and they run fine. I would prefer to have all my drives the SSD ones but there isnt any over 500GB yet and way too pricey.
 
Possible but not worth it in any way, shape or form. Why would you want to so this anyway?

Oh and games from an external hard drive will run like poo

Pfffffffff! Let me try to be concise and to the point.

I bought Wings of Prey a few days ago, I fall in love with the game the first few minutes I played the demo. It's not expensive, converted back to GBP it's only GBP 25.00.

However, an issue surfaced when I was done with the installation. It says 2 activations left. See below:

9202010223446.png


As you fellas know, I normally use Steady State on 32 bits Vista and Deep Freeze on 64 bits Vista. Given the installation limitations, I have to give up Steady State or let the installation exhausted one way or the other. What about when I need to upgrade my ATI Driver.

What you can do is to deactivate it before you wipe out your hard disk and reinstall Windows afterwards. Now that's great, but I tried that once and found that the issue still remains. Deactivations are counted the same way as Activation, only difference is that you have 10 deactivations!! What a delightful surprise?!

One thing I can make out is that the purpose of this limitations. I recall Company of Heroes imposes something similar but they don't strictly put a number of activations there. They just say something like watch out your re-installations or you may not get activations for too many times.

In order to resolve this issue, I bought a Seagate External 250GB hard drive. It worths the money because WOP is really flight sim game of the year 2010 in my opinion.

But now I've found out that it's not a simple deal to install Vista on an external USB drive. I have MyBook and it is connected via eSATA that's no problem with it. As to USB drive...:rolleyes:
 
Dual Boot?


To keep them separate, you could change the partition id of the existing install from 7 to, say, 83. That way when you start Install B, Windows will ignore the "unrecognized" partition.

BitLocker also helps with segregation.
 
Back
Top Bottom