Here is what I have. Dell Inspiron 9100 60GB 5400rpm 3.2 P4 HT 512MB ram External 40GB 4200rpm USB HDD I want to use Gentoo Linux as my primary OS on the system. The deal is I want the 60gig internal drive to be dedicated to Gentoo. The only real reason why I even want XP to boot on the system is for the occasional LAN party. So I decided to try installing XP on the external 40gig USB 2.0 drive. The initial stages of the install went fine. I formated the drive into one NTFS partition, it then copied the installation files to the external drive. Then it rebooted the system. NOTE: I already had XP installed on the internal drive, so it altered the boot.ini file to boot to the external drive by default to finish the installation. It would seem to boot up just fine, the Windows splash screen would display along with the progress bar, but after a few moments it would blue-screen. There error was 0x7B. I changed the boot.ini and added a switch /sos. Then I tried booting again. It loaded all the drivers then took me to a graphical screen that told me how much memory I had and how many CPU's. It sat at that screen for a moment then I got another BSD, same error. The last driver to load was MUP.sys, which I think is the last driver the systems loads. Is it even possible to install XP on an external USB HDD? If so can I be directed to some documention on how it is done. Thanks for the help.

Windows does not support external boot yet. KPACHbIЙ OKTIABR

I don't think it ever will.

I found this. Don't know if it works. You need first to download the executable file at the following address http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Maxtor/?epi_menuItemID=3c67e325e0a6b1f6294198b091346068&epi_menuID=976d37cd478c5826433f226075b46068&epi_baseMenuID=976d37cd478c5826433f226075b46068&channelpath=/en_us/Support/Software%20Downloads/External%20Hard%20Drives&downloadID=25&displayEULA=true It's your HD driver. You should find it on a CD given by your dealer. This EXE extracts drivers files. In the folder \MaxtorDrv you will find files needed for your HD. So get a computer running WinXP, download that files said before and run it. After that, you will find that directory (c:\MaxtorDrv) on the HD. Copy files from (C:\MaxtorDrv\Drivers\usb) to a floppy disk and then go to your computer having XP on the USB drive. Start PC with the floppy in the floppy drive and press F6 when it's asked. It should give you the info on your USB drive and you just need to select it and install it. Run windows and it should be okay!