old p3 boot off a usb stick ??

Mantaray · 2 Nov 2009 at 21:30

i was just looking around an saw a old p3 doing nothing i have no hdds ... bt a nice big usb stick ...... i cud use that program that makes win xp smaller ... bt im thinking its old and wont boot off usb .. am i right ? or is there another way i cud do it ........

alex24 · 2 Nov 2009 at 21:31

Depends on the motherboard, but almost certainly won't boot from USB. You could boot from CD though.

Mantaray · 2 Nov 2009 at 21:34

im guessing i wud have to boot from cd and tell it to point to the usb or something

alex24 · 2 Nov 2009 at 21:45

Yeah, that might work, but I don't see an old system being able to address the USB stick as a boot drive, so it would probably never be able to boot from it.

P3 is useless now anyway, not much you can do with it bar small server or car pc or similar, and even then you're struggling to justify it against how cheap atom CPUs and other low power alternatives are.

I say sell or recycle it!

Mantaray · 2 Nov 2009 at 21:50

hehe just was bored .. in 1 of those i want to build somet moods hehe ...

.walls · 3 Nov 2009 at 18:45

if it has a floppy, you could probably chainload the OS on a USB stick using grub.

The hard part of course would be getting windows installed on the usb stick... which can also be done, but it's not too easy.