Boot from external hard drive?

J

julz

New Member
Hi. I'm new here so sorry for any noobishness. ;)

I have a computer with Win XP and would also like to install Mandrake/Mandriva on it. The current hard drive is only 20 gigs and it is all partitioned for XP to use. To avoid installing a new internal hard drive I was hoping that i could set up a new external drive and boot Linux from it as a secondary OS, with XP booting by default.

Can i boot from an external drive? If So, is it easy(ish) to set up?

Thanks for any help and sorry if this is in the wrong section, i wasn't sure if it should go here or in "Operating Systems".

Thanks again,
Julz :)
 
Most newer computers tend to have an option to do so. If you go into the bios(usally pressing DEL, F1, or some such key during start up, when your comp's counting the RAM and all) you can find a boot order menu. Be sure your drive is connected before you go here. Normally, they will pop up in the menu and you could simply set them first.

Now, I tried to do this once with my dad's computer and his old harddrive which was still intact with Windows 98, and it didn't work... I don't know if Linux or a newer OS would work better, but it is suppose to be possible.

If it won't work, sticking the drive into your machine really wouldn't be too hard at all. You could even disconnect your primary drive so you could be sure nothing would happen to it.
 
hmm. well, i have xp pro sp1a. would the bios recognise a usb drive though? that would be how its connected so if it recognises it i will ty.
thanks
 
you cant run an os from an external hdd. at least i tried it seems to work and then it just restarts.
 
no, i copy the whole drive to another identical drive and load it in the external case. the bios already enable usb support and legacy devices in dos already.

i read somewhere that they didnt allow this because of piracy.
 
Well what I tried was with the old HD(wasn't a copy or anything) It would begin to load but then stop... It seems odd they would give an option to boot from USB devices yet nothing can boot from them :P I'm sure there's SOME way to do it.
 
hmm. i tried to get into the bios to check but someone set a password and noone knows it (it's secondhand). any way to get a round this? i am not very optimistic of a solution.
 
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