if i had an external floppy drive could it be used in dos so in the event of a system boot failure or installing of windows i found in the past Internal IDE not to b reliable The simplest solutions are the best and they are often save you money

You say your OS is Windows XP. There is no DOS in Windows XP. Unless you have a Dual-boot machine with both DOS and XP? Perhaps you can clarify exactly what it is you're trying to do. "found in the past Internal IDE not to b reliable " Not reliable for what exactly? Life's more painless for the brainless.

Yes, no and maybe. If you BIOS supports usb devices (as boot devices) fully then there may not be an issue at all. If your BIOS doesn't then you might be in trouble to some extent. Other ways include putting a floppy image on a CD, usb flash and pxe boot. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10