External OS?

alienationware

alienationware

New Member
Is it possible to have an OS (Win XP/Vista) installed and ran completely on an external HD in a laptop with no internal HD present? That way, if you have 2 external HD's, it would be like having 2 laptops. (I'm sick of trojans and viruses from the "do-whatever" partition infecting the partition where I do my online banking and other confidential stuff).

Cheers.
 
Maybe the issue is you need to be a little more savy when using your computer. If your an experinced user then you shouldn't be having any problems with virus' or spyware. Certainly not enough to be wanting to do what your asking. I have never used AV and never have gotten a virus. I wanted to get a virus and had trouble finding one actually. Besides if you really are that careless with your system then your gonna get infected no matter what you do. Education is the best defense again infection.
 
You can boot off of USB devices if your BIOS supports it, but performance wise it will be slower than the internal drive. If you are worried about viruses why not try something like deep freeze?
 
tlarkin said:
You can boot off of USB devices if your BIOS supports it, but performance wise it will be slower than the internal drive. If you are worried about viruses why not try something like deep freeze?
Click to expand...

USB stick is bound to die out after so many random read/writes. they're basically an extremely cheap (price and quality) version of SSD.
 
I tried removing all permissions to my banking partition under Vista. Tough luck. The trojan was still able to get there. Btw, what is "deep freeze"?
 
alienationware said:
I tried removing all permissions to my banking partition under Vista. Tough luck. The trojan was still able to get there. Btw, what is "deep freeze"?
Click to expand...

Deep freeze is a product that freezes your HD so nothing can write to it once you get it set up. So viruses can't do jack. You can unfreeze or thaw it out and install stuff then freeze it again. Google search it for more info.
 
Oh, i c. I tried to "deep freeze" the partition by removing all permissions to it, but that didn't work. N/m I'll make google my friend. I'm feeling lucky. :D
 
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