Hey,

I’ll make this brief, as it’s not really worth expanding on. Tis just a simple question, that I couldn’t find any answers for using google:

Is it possible to boot windows from a USB Portable Hard drive?

Thanks in Advance

--- Luke

Theoretically yes if your motherboard supports such a boot choice. In practice it doesnt always work. Until such booting from USB devices becomes much more standard I would check around and find people who have actually achieved this and then make a note of the actual hardware involved.

Hey,

I’ll make this brief, as it’s not really worth expanding on.
I disagree. It is well worth expanding on. :)

Before I say more let it be known that I have not had tried it yet. Well I did try it but nothing more than enabling it in BIOS and plugging in the USB drive. Needless to say it didn't work. :rolleyes:

That being said, I am sure it would require properly installing the OS to the USB drive. Or at least making an image from the internal HDD and placing it in the right place on the USB HDD. Meaning if the system partition is the first one on the disk then it has to be the first on the USB HDD as well. Or the boot files would be incorrect, thus not loading th OS.

Hmm...the boot files would probably still be incorrect though if you imaged from the internal HDD, since the boot files reference what device the OS is on......

Hmm... Now you got me all interested in it again. :p Now I will have to try it. The kids computer is the only one in the house that can boot from USB, they are going to be mad when I am taking up their computer. :eek: ...And no they can't use mine. :p

I read that if you have two HDD's connected...
One on an internal IDE controller,
The other on an IDE controller card,
then [if the BIOS supports it] you must tell the BIOS to boot from SCSI.

I wonder if USB is similar?

How do you tell the BIOS which of the two HDD's to boot from?

Perhaps you could boot "Smart Boot Manager" from a floppy and use that to specify which drive to boot from.

Heck, one time I had to charge my sister's iPod on my pc's firewire port while I was installing windows. It asked me where to install it, on a 152gb partition, or on a 15 gb drive...:P.

I suppose it *could* work. But methinks you should use XP SP2 for the best results.

How do you tell the BIOS which of the two HDD's to boot from?
With the USB drive attached you enter the BIOS setup. You look for the boot options and if booting from USB is available you select USB-HDD, USB-Zip, USB-CDROM or USB-FDD as appropriate. As long as the BIOS does now detect the HDD then you may be able to boot to that drive at the next startup or to fdisk it, set an active partition and istall an OS etc etc.

In practice it doesnt always work for HDDs though USB floppy and CD booting seems to be much more successful; particularly on notebooks that purport to support USB bootability.

Controller cards use a SCSI interface and so your modern BIOS needs a SCSI boot option to be able to boot to a HDD on a PCI card. On older BIOS you could not mix IDE and SCSI HDDs without boot problems but once the BIOS could present one with an IDE or SCSI option this no longer applied.

For completeness, booting to USB flash drives is a different procedure than booting to USB HDDs since they, among other things, dont have a standard mbr. Booting to USB-Zip is supposed to work for them but in practice I have never been able to get this to work directly from my own mobo.

As long as SBM detects the USB drive you might be able to boot to it. SBM is reliant on the way the BIOS reports things to it but only trial and error would give you the answer for any particular system - I have my doubts that it has the DOS drivers for USB recognition however. BootIt-Ng installed as a BootManager might be a more successful way of booting up using a 3rdParty utilitly but it too can procuce very mixed results and also mess up booting to your normal HDD as long as a USB drive is attached during start-up.