How to put windows on an external hard drive

[aheydari3]

I wanted to know how to do that, because when i put on Win XP cd, it only let to put it on my pirmary hard drive, and i can't make an extran primary.
Thx

 

[HoopaJoop]

If at all possible, you'll need to get the drivers on a floppy for your drive. Be it usb or ieee1394.

As soon as the blue installation window appears hit F6. (it should tell you at the bottom of the screen)

It will ask you to insert the driver disk. Do so and it should recognize the drive to install on.

Hope this helps.

 

[aheydari3]

wait, wut driver? wut i'm trying to do is just to have an extra back up windows just in case if my regualr note book harddrive dies again on me, i would have an extra oprating system to bring it up and get the data out befor formating.
ThX

 

[RealBlackStuff]

The driver for that external disk.

 

[aheydari3]

well, i have win. Xp so i never used the drivers for it. I bought it from compusa, and it's their barnd, so i can't found the drivers. Can someone help?
This is the link for my external harddrive:
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=315407&pfp=BROWSE&tabtype=pi#moreinfo

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Towards the end on this link is a lot of info about your external USB-drive. HTH
http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=74169

 

[aheydari3]

i don't really get it.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Befoer anyone goes mental, can your PC "see" that USB-drive in Windows Explorer?
Can you copy to and from it, delete files?

If not, you may have damaged the USB-electronics of the drive.

PS: to install an extra copy of XP, that partition need NOT be a primary one. (you can have only one anyway).
You will find a newly created boot-menu afterwards at startup, from which you can select into which XP to boot.

 

[Samstoned]

do you want to add make a double boot OS or are you trying to just boot from the USB HDD
if double boot follow realblackstuff's advice
To clearify and all you want to do is make a primery boot USB
your MB bios must be able to boot from USB if not all you can do is go through first HDD OS boot ini file
this goes for some addon IDE cards also

 

[aheydari3]

ok i can copy and delet from it and everything. I did what he said, I out my windows cd in it, so i can install it. Than i pressed F6 and asked to put the driver for it in my floppy drive. I don't have the driver and i think that's my problem. Also the reason i want to do this is because i have an laptop with windows 2000 on it, which i use for work and all. I been haveing some issue with it, so i wanted to install an windows on it, by using my desktop computer, so if the windows fails again, at least i can load up with the external and be able to get out some files, or do something with it.
Thank you

 

[aheydari3]

can anyone help?

 

[delafoo]

external

There's a program called Casper XP which will clone your hard drive to an external or internal seperate drive. Exactly, everthing, Windows, all your programs, EVERYTHING.

Though, using a usb hard drive wouldn't be too good, it would take forever to load, and it's really not possible to boot from an (USB or Firewire) external drive yet, and since you're using a notebook hard drive, and that's not the same type of HD in your external, so they're not interchangable.

LaCie makes a new external SATA drive, which has the advantage over USB and Firewire of being as fast and sometimes faster than an internal drive. This drive you can boot from (I moved my entire system to my external eSATA and deleted my internal drive for storage). They make a PCMIA card to connect it to your PC with a SATA port.

bb