booting WinXp from external usb drive

M

merkelck

n00b
Joined
May 3, 2007
Messages
2
The laptop is an HP dv6000 running Winxp Home up-to-date. For the test, I made an image of the system using TrueImage. I then restored that image to an external usb drive connected to that same computer. I then tried to boot the computer from that drive by selecting the "USB Hard Drive" from the bios list during startup (PhoenixBIOS f.11). The usb drive shows activity and the Windows splash screen appears but almost immediately it blue screens and then immediately restarts. HP tech support says "you can't do that" with no explanation nor any explanation as to why the bios supports an external usb hard drive or the usb key drive.
If the bios supports these items, how are they implemented?
I hear folks talking about booting to these usb pocket drives but I have never heard about how they got the system on them in the first place.
Any thoughts appreciated!
 
You really wouldn't want to run any Windows OS off of a USB drive anyway. The performance would make it nearly unusable. You can boot to DOS or other smaller OSes from those drivers to run certain utilities.

As for the backup, it sounds like you did that wrong. Instead of wasting the whole external drive, why not just stick an image file on it instead? You cloned your whole drive to the external, which makes that useless for just about anything else.
 
Thanks for the replies and ideas. I checked out those two links and found that some of the internal links are invalid. The one promising link requires a couple of software packages that would not be prudent for me to invest in. I think I will set this on the back burner for awhile.
 
If you're still interested in doing so, you can run a liveCD/mini distro like BartPE or DamnSmallLinux from a USB 2.0 drive with no problem. I've done the BartPE and it works great, download the PE builder and look for a GUI based app called PE2USB, if you have a 2GB or smaller USB drive. Just customize the BartPE to have the apps and drivers and you're set.

Also, an app called FlashBoot will let you format up to a 4GB flash drive and mount a PE ISO from it. Only thing is the stick has to be formatted in FAT16, and FlashBoot costs money.

Also, I've seen experiments using XPe (XP Embedded) to run an XP environment from flash, I've been trying to get it setup to test it but haven't found the time.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top