Dual boot on an external hard drive

[simslee]

Hi everybody,
Can anyone help me
Is it possible to have an xppro dual boot system on my laptop, one OS on the internal harddrive and the other on a FAT32 partition on a USB external hard drive.
I have tried to do this, all the partitions ( internal & external ) are picked up in XPRO setup and you have the choice to select the partition to install to, setup copies the setup files to the partition on the external hardrive and then restarts the laptop, so far so good
When the computer restarts, setup states that an error has occured and can not proceed, it also states that windows has shut down to protect the computer,check hard drives with CHKDSK remove new hardware ect ect.
Setup does like the USB external hard drive I have copied the files directly on to the external hard drive and run setup from the partition I want to install onto but only to find I have the same problem.
What I am trying to achieve is two completely different computers in one, one for business and one for downloading music, I want the downloading music section to be completly seperate from the business section.
As you can tell I am a novice, can anyone help?
Simon

[nuz]

Try entering your BIOS and setting up the USB HDD before the primary HDD (HDD0 in most systems). You will probably have to repeat this every time you want to switch between the two, so you'd best see if someone can suggest a better solution. In the meantime, this should allow you to complete installation. If not you might need boot.ini and ntldr.dat in your USB HDD.

[Paul Komski]

There are those that say you can install windows directly onto USB drives. I have never had hardware that is compatible in such a way that it will allow booting from and into a USB IDE or USB SATA hard drive. Flash memory can occasionally be made to work (http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm) but even though it might appear from a BIOS priority boot list that you can boot from USB floppy, cdrom, zip and hard drive, whilst the first three are usually fine the latter will fail. It fails, I believe, because such legacy BIOS just don't support external hard drives as IPLs (Initial Program Loaders).

When you begin the install from the existing active partition on the internal hard drive and attempt to load windows onto a Windows boot partition on a USB hard drive, the initial copying of files is OK but the restart (which is when you have had repeated problems) fails because setup at this point of the text setup is DOS-like and has no drivers with which to see the external drive any more.

It may well be that the next generation of BIOSes will be able to directly support booting to Windows on USB drives - by utilising a BCD somewhere - but I don't believe we have yet reached that point in time.

What you could do is to resize the existing Windows partition downwards by say 6 to 10 gig and install a second installation of XP into the vacated space. Then use your external as the place to store all programs and downloaded data whenever you boot to this second installation of a dual boot system.

It's possible that if you had an eSATA port on a laptop that you might be able to boot to an eSATA external if supported in the BIOS. I have never tried it but must experiment some time.

If not you might need boot.ini and ntldr.dat in your USB HDD.The mandatory boot elements in a WinXP system partition (whether on a floppy, floppy-emulated CD or hard drive active partition) are an NT formatted FAT or NTFS partition (ie a PBS that supports ntldr) and the three files boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com. No good simply copying them onto the USB partition. If setup would work from such a USB drive it would, in any case, be capable of creating the correct structures for itself.

PS
The time is ripe for a Puppy recommendation from Sylvander. But it would be another way of using your PC without installing any hard drive installation if all you want to do is to go online and download onto the USB drive. Any Linux Live CD (Puppy, Knoppix, Ubuntu) should do the trick without going near your current operating system at all.

[simslee]

Thank you Nuz & Paul for your advise it seems that I have quite a lot of experimenting to do, I wonder if I could start the setup and then when it fails boot in to dos and edit the boot.ini and ntldr.dat files on the USB HDD, forgive me if this sounds stupid but I am guessing as I am not by any means an expert.
I will have a look at Linux, I have never used it, I wonder which version is the most user friendly.

[Sylvander]

1. "I will have a look at Linux, I have never used it, I wonder which version is the most user friendly"
I had in the past tried a number of Linux distros, but didn't get hooked because it seemed so difficult to actually get anything done.
Then ErnieK suggested I try Puppy Linux, and it sort of pulled me in. :)
I could actually do things in Puppy. :cool:
Then I discovered that some of the things I could do were REALLY COOL. :D :cool:
And it boots so FAST, and runs so FAST, and is free of all the hassle caused by the possibility of infection that you get with Windows...
That I find myself reluctant to boot into Windows.
Much prefer to boot into BoxPup, from where I am working right now.

2.
(a) A Puppy/puplet seems to be able to run on almost any normal hardware.
A generic "live" optical disk isn't customized for any particular hardware, so it can run on almost anything.
As you boot the optical disk you are asked to specify your hardware [type of mouse and keyboard etc].

(b) If you shut down a session without saving any of the configurations or package installations you made...
Then the next time you boot the optical disk you are right back at the beginning and must re-do all of the configurations.

(c) If having booted an optical disk...
And not previously made any "pup_save" file...
You can at shut-down or restart...
Make a pup_save file to hold a record of your configurations and/or installations.
And when asked you can choose to ENCRYPT that file [various levels of encryption can be chosen].
I believe this is one method of making what is called a "Frugal install".

(d) The pup_save file can be held on ANY handy partition [various common partition file systems supported = Linux, NTFS, FAT].
The default location is in the root folder of a partition.
This can be changed by making special configurations whilst within the Puppy environment.
When you boot any Puppy from an optical disk it automatically looks [searches all partitions] for a pup_save file.
If it finds only one it uses it; if it finds more than one it asks the user to specify which one to use.

(e) Or you can install the Puppy to a number of possible locations provided they can be booted.
[I'm no expert on this]
The "Puppy Universal Installer" is used to easily complete the installation.

e.g.
(f) USB Flash Drive or external USB HDD.
If the PC's BIOS can boot USB, then all's well.
If it cannot, you simply use the "WakePup2" program supplied within Puppy to easily make a WakePup2 bootable floppy.
When you boot that, it will automatically look for an OS installed on a USB device and load it when found.

(g) Moving USB devices from this PC to that.
I'm not sure how this would be arranged so that Puppy could work on this hardware or that.
An installed Puppy has configurations made to match certain hardware.
I wonder how it would react when you connect it to different hardware, for which it has not yet been configured?
I believe if you make a "Frugal install" you can make different pup_save files, one for each hardware set...
And name them to match the hardware, and choose the correct pup_save that matches the present hardware.

[Paul Komski]

I wrote this earlier but forgot to post it so, since Sylvander has posted in the interim, some of it may be a bit late in the day.I wonder which version is the most user friendlyDifferent people say different things; I personally think Ubuntu is the easiest for Linux newbies, Puppy for a small download that has fast access (particularly on older hardware) and Knoppix for Windows troubleshooting; there are other "distros" as well. The beauty of a Live CD is that since you don't have to install-to or access the hard drive (but just run everything off the CD) is that you can experiment with them all till you find the one that suits you without affecting your current system at all.

Sorry but you can't start setup and have it not complete and then start editing the boot files. Yes, technically, you could edit boot.ini using a number of techniques but unless there is a completed installation of Windows (a) there is nothing valid for you to point it at and (b) it is likely that there is no valid partition boot sector on the external drive since that part of setup was never reached in the first place. If you were (in a theoretical sense) able to complete setup and wanted to use a valid boot.ini file then one could use the boot.ini already in existence in C: to dual boot or to boot from a specially prepared quickboot WinXP floppy diskette to get Windows booted.

The only way I know of to "install" a complete installation to a USB external would be to copy the whole of an existing partition (or restore an image file of a working IDE/SATA partition) over to the external drive using something like BiNG (in my sig). This still won't work for Windows XP if the drive is USB whether you attempt to use boot.ini on the transferred partition, from the original partition, from a floppy or whatever and the reason is to do with the way Win2K/XP and probably Vista and 7 initialize hardware.

The BIOS is only used by WinXP to find the boot device and if your BIOS supports booting from a USB hard drive it should be able to identify it and its active partition and find boot.ini and ntldr and you may well see the Windows black & white fuel gauge appear. The next thing is the boot up will crash or restart. The reason is that WinXP polls the hardware for itself (it doesn't use and indeed disregards whatever the BIOS has already detected) but because it hasn't yet loaded its own USB drivers it fails to see its own boot partition and the files it needs to contine the boot up.

I thought it would be interesting to try this out this morning so copied a working partition to a 1TB USB/eSATA external drive and attempted to boot to it using USB. No go - it crashed immediately after the boot.ini menu appeared. Reconnected the very same drive via its eSATA cable and Bingo - boot up with no problems.

So basically, I think your only hope of running a second WinXP installed on an external is to use an eSATA interface. I am sure there will be eSATA PCMCIA cards that would allow you to setup the hardware to access an external as a data storage device. After that it all depends on whether the BIOS is capable of booting an eSATA on a cardbus.