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just a warning; it's a long post, but I was trying to be thorough
I'm having problems booting from an external 2.5" hdd with XP pro installed on it. I recently bought an enclosure for my laptop's hdd, and would like to use it as both a storage drive and an alternate for my main hdd. before removing the hdd from my laptop, I restored it's OS (XP MCE 2005) with the OEM's restore CD, tweaked around with the OS to remove all the bundled garbage with some minor cosmetic changes (like wallpaper, icon size, etc), installed a few apps that I use fairly often (namely firefox and thunderbird), let the OS auto-update itself completely (even WGA), and a ran defrag for good measure. after all this, I slap the hdd into the enclosure and plug it into my main system via usb 2.0. woot! it works! XP recognizes the drive just fine the first time, and I was able to read\write to it, but (how) can I boot from it?
BIOS appears to be set up correctly, with USB booting/legacy enabled, and the boot device is set as the 2nd device to boot (with the internal hdd as first, and my single DVD-RW drive as third). I've also tried to modify the 'boot.ini' file on both hdd's to add the OS multi-boot style. still unsuccessful, though I did make some progress. Instead of MS's bootloader crashing and rebooting, I now get a drive configuration error (still crashing, but now I have to press ctrl+alt+del
).
the one-page manual is no help. it doesn't cover proper assembly of the enclosure, and the 'step-by-step' instructions provided drastically different screenshots than what I experienced. basically, XP auto-installed the drive, so I had to manually update the driver for the USB storage adapter with the one included on the provided CD (which has no setup executable). I should probably mention that I had to do a little digging through Device Manager to make sure I updated the driver properly. I also briefly considered the possibility of changing the jumper on the internal hdd so something other than 'cable select', but nah, that can't be it.
so now I'm stuck at 2 conclusions. either I need to find a suitable driver, or booting XP from external usb is not possible. any suggestions or ideas?
specs:
external HDD: 2.5'' 80GB Toshiba MK-8025GAS inside a Masscool UHB-UE209 enclosure
internal HDD: 200GB PATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 200826
I'm having problems booting from an external 2.5" hdd with XP pro installed on it. I recently bought an enclosure for my laptop's hdd, and would like to use it as both a storage drive and an alternate for my main hdd. before removing the hdd from my laptop, I restored it's OS (XP MCE 2005) with the OEM's restore CD, tweaked around with the OS to remove all the bundled garbage with some minor cosmetic changes (like wallpaper, icon size, etc), installed a few apps that I use fairly often (namely firefox and thunderbird), let the OS auto-update itself completely (even WGA), and a ran defrag for good measure. after all this, I slap the hdd into the enclosure and plug it into my main system via usb 2.0. woot! it works! XP recognizes the drive just fine the first time, and I was able to read\write to it, but (how) can I boot from it?
BIOS appears to be set up correctly, with USB booting/legacy enabled, and the boot device is set as the 2nd device to boot (with the internal hdd as first, and my single DVD-RW drive as third). I've also tried to modify the 'boot.ini' file on both hdd's to add the OS multi-boot style. still unsuccessful, though I did make some progress. Instead of MS's bootloader crashing and rebooting, I now get a drive configuration error (still crashing, but now I have to press ctrl+alt+del
). the one-page manual is no help. it doesn't cover proper assembly of the enclosure, and the 'step-by-step' instructions provided drastically different screenshots than what I experienced. basically, XP auto-installed the drive, so I had to manually update the driver for the USB storage adapter with the one included on the provided CD (which has no setup executable). I should probably mention that I had to do a little digging through Device Manager to make sure I updated the driver properly. I also briefly considered the possibility of changing the jumper on the internal hdd so something other than 'cable select', but nah, that can't be it.
so now I'm stuck at 2 conclusions. either I need to find a suitable driver, or booting XP from external usb is not possible. any suggestions or ideas?
specs:
external HDD: 2.5'' 80GB Toshiba MK-8025GAS inside a Masscool UHB-UE209 enclosure
internal HDD: 200GB PATA Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 200826