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Name: upurz2
Has anyone been able to successfully boot XP from a removable device such as a USB2 hard drive?
I am trying to accomplish this primarily to see if it can be done. My BIOS will boot from a USB device.
My first test was to make a disk image of my C drive which contains XP and restore it to my USB2 drive. Everything went OK.
I then booted from the USB2 drive and got the XP boot screen. After about 5 seconds I got a BSOD Stop x'7B' error. At least I proved you can boot from an external drive.
My thinking on this error is that when XP got full control it had no USB drivers to continue pulling stuff off of my USB2 drive.
Just a guess.I am also wondering if XP can be installed in the usual way to an external device directly? If it can this might solve the BSOD problem I had. Maybe, maybe not.
Anyways.... Has anyone been able to bring up XP from a removal USB2 device? If so, how did you do it?
Thanks.
IF the BIOS specifically supports boot from "USB HARD DRIVE" it should work as the BIOS should emulate INT15.
Boot from the XP CD with all other IDE/SATA drives disconnected and see if XP recognises the USB drive!!
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IMHO Given the way M$ does their business in making money, I believe they coded the XP installation wizard to not install itself on any removable device such as USB.
i_XpUser
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To further my belief, the WPA (Windows Product Activation) itself is M$'s greatest invention and moneymaking. The WPA checks 10 categories of hardwares fixed inside a computer.
The hardware is checked each time Windows boots, to ensure that it is still on the same machine
Swappable hard drive bay (and USB HD) do not enter into the WPA calculation.
The above is how Uncles Gates & Ballmer made themselves billionaires.
i_XpUser
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I agree with XPUser. My question would be, why are you attempting this? If it's just innocent experimentation, try installing XP on the USB drive instead of swapping your curent drive.
Moving XP hard drives around causes problems with XP activation.
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"Boot from the CD? I don't understand where you are going with this?"
The XP CD is bootable and you need to run thru the install to ascertain if the USB Drive is recognised as a drive on which XP would be able to be installed too...hence why you need to disconnect all other IDE/SATA drives
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Please try what plainandsimple suggested and post back. I am of the opinion that it will not work because WPA does not recognize removable HD as fixed HD.
i_XpUser
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There are a few Linux installations that will install on a usb drive. I actually went out and bought a 512 mb usb2 thumbdrive and tried to install Windows 2000 on it just to see if I could do it but I didn't realize you need a lot bigger one than that for that purpose. When installing it said that I needed to have at least 6 hundred something. But it did seem like it was going to install. I didn't feel like spending more money for something I wasn't going to use, that I was just messing around with so I never tried it again.
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I need to correct myself. WPA alone is not M$ greatest invention and moneymaking. WPA together with the tightly-written EULA are what made our Uncles rich (I haven't gotten any Chritsmas from my greedy Uncles).
i_XpUser
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As I see it there are a few different flavors of installing XP on a USB device.
The first is what I attempted to do, restore an Image of my XP system onto a USB device.
As I stated, the USB device did boot. It was during the XB bootup process that I got the BSOD. Possibly due to no USB support in this early stage of initializing XP.
Then there is the question of can you install XP on a removable drive from scratch. From what I have read, the install process will not let you do this. Haven't tried it yet.
As far as my restored image USB drive goes I might attempt to run a Repair on it to see if that will get things going. However, it might not let me Repair a USB device just like a full install might not let me use a USB device.
As to why I am doing this???? It's the same reason people keep climbing Mount Everest. :-) Also it would be a nice way to test out different Operating Systems keeping them isolated from other drives.
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My USB Windows drive does not even show up on the Repair screen. Just my normal Windows drive. I bet this also means a full install would also not recognize my USB device.
Doesn't look too promising for booting XP from a USB drive.
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Bootable Usb with Xp system won't run in any pc. But for sure this one is very nice only about 50 Mb, follow the instruction here
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The method outlined in the link you provided is not what I am trying to do. This method involves building a PE environment which I already do use although from a CD.
I am basically trying to use my USB2 drive as if it were an IDE drive. If I was doing the same exact thing but to another IDE drive in my computer I would not be having any problems. The fact the other drive is USB is the problem.
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