Transfering internal laptop HDD to external enclosure?

[alexyang]

I plan to purchase a new internal hard drive and transfer my current internal hard drive to an external enclosure. My internal HDD is not broken. Rather, I would like to triple boot XP, Archlinux, and OpenBSD, with Archlinux as my primary OS.

If I choose to boot my computer from the "new external hard drive," will there be any problems? My key concern is that the drive won't be "C:" anymore and that all the shortcuts will be broken.

 

[Gorankar]

Are we talking e-sata or usb? I have no experience with Archlinux or OpenBSD, but I know from experience that getting Xp to install to a usb external can be painful. And that once it is installed, it is sluggish when run from a usb connected external.

Xp can still be the C: drive. When I still dual booted Vista and Xp, Both thought that they were installed to the C; drive. When I was in Xp it saw it's own drive as C: and Vista's drive as D: . When I was in Vista it saw it's own drive as C: and Xp's as D: . I just use VM's now and don't remember if it did that by default or not.

 

[alphanumeric]

Moving your current drive to external enclosure and then trying to boot the already installed XP will likely fail. The boot.ini path will still be pointed to the controller in the laptop. I would think you would have to edit the:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
line in the boot.ini file. I have no idea what you would edit it to though?

 

[alexyang]

Are we talking e-sata or usb? I have no experience with Archlinux or OpenBSD, but I know from experience that getting Xp to install to a usb external can be painful. And that once it is installed, it is sluggish when run from a usb connected external.

It would be for a USB-connected external enclosure, and I wouldn't be installing XP onto the "new" external hard drive; it would have my existing XP already on it.

If the performance is poor, that's something to think about, though.

 

[alexyang]

Moving your current drive to external enclosure and then trying to boot the already installed XP will likely fail. The boot.ini path will still be pointed to the controller in the laptop. I would think you would have to edit the:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect
line in the boot.ini file. I have no idea what you would edit it to though?

I see, thank you very much for this tip. I will investigate further. It appears that this venture will be a lot harder than I originally thought.