I have recently invested in a laptop, and my desktop started giving me some weird trouble about the same time. I’m considering going with just my laptop and getting rid of my desktop entirely, since the laptop is more capable, faster, stronger, better, and portable!! I have a lot of good stuff on my desktop’s hard drives though. My music and picture collection on one drive, all my gaming and applications on the main drive.
The desktop is XP, the lappy is a Vista/XP dual boot machine. The lappy, and this is my only beef with it, is kinda short on the drive size. I’m considering getting an external USB hd enclosure so I can access all my old info/files/etc and retire the desktop to The Closet of Outdated and Tired Crap, aka the Compy Crypt.
My question is, does anyone know if you would be able to run a dual boot setup with the external drives? I’d like to keep Vista on the lappy, but be able to boot to XP on the external drive. I’ve been looking (my search skills are, to say the least, not the greatest) and haven’t really been able to locate any definite information on this. My hubby is fairly certain that it’s not possible to boot from a USB device without going to Linux, if even that would work. Any ideas or advice would be much appreciated!
Well, you can boot to Windows PE or XP embedded from USB, but unless something has changed very recently, you can’t officially run the full version of Windows from a USB drive.
There are ways around this, however. Some people have got it working through adding simple boot options to a USB drive and then having a script launch a Windows installation from the same drive. I haven’t tried it so I can’t vouch for it, but you can read all about it here…