So I'm about to repartition my notebook computer's main drive. I'd like to get rid of WinXP Home (almost) completely from it, leaving (nearly) the whole 100GB for Kubuntu Linux.

But I do use WinXP for BIOS upgrades, and for PhotoshopCS.

So, I'd like to install the WinXP Home to an external USB2 hard drive I have here, and just plug it in when needed. The BIOS knows how to boot from USB drives, no problem.

And during my first attempt at this, WinXP Home thought it knew how to install itself to this device, by demanding a small boot partition on the main notebook drive (fine by me). It installed ntldr and a couple of other tiny files there, and put everything else onto the USB drive.

But on the first reboot after setup finished copying the first set of files, it shows the windows splash screen, thinks for several long seconds, and then gives me a BSOD with some silly message about having detected a critical fault with my drive or something.

So.. is this doable? Anyone know how to tweak it?

I'm guessing that it needs the USB drivers on that tiny boot partition, so that ntldr can then find and boot the main drive. But what do I know.

Cheers

I read something about this in some mag recently. did a quick Google search and came up with this . Boot from a flash drive. Check out the link to the Bart PE Builder. Dont know if it will help or not.

The article was hinting at taking your desktop with you on a thumb drive.

Mmm.. that's cool. Not exactly what I was looking for, but the tips therein oughta help.


thanks!

in the same way that windows needs drivers to boot off anything that isn't IDE compatible, wouldn't you need drivers for the ESB drive?

If the BIOS is smart enough to get the boot record from a USB drive - that's all that's needed to get things rolling. From there it's all down hill.

Okay, many months later, I found this How-To description for modifying the WinXP install CD so that it just works when the target is a USB drive.

And.. it just worked for me. Fiddly to do the mods -- needed an ISO image editor, and I couldn't find one for Linux. But I did find a cracked copy of a Windows based tool that did the job for me (inside a throwaway VMware snapshot).

And one has to ensure that the external USB target disk is the *only* disk in the system during the install, as otherwise the XP installer still puts the bootloader onto the wrong drive.

So I now have a WinXP installer CD that also happens to work for USB install targets, plus a 60GB external bootable USB drive with XP on it, along with DVDShrink, DVDDecrypter, and PhotoShopCS (my three most used Winapps).

Cheers