installing windows xp onto external hard drive

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birdman664

New Member
Hello computer forum.

I have had my Dell Inspiron 1150 for about 2.5 years. I received the computer along with about 20 others for free from my college. Since then at least 5 of the computers have had hard drives go bad. I decided I need to do something so I want to install windows xp to my external hard drive.

-First I checked to see if I could boot from a USB. I can.
-I put the Windows XP Home Edition into my CD ROM drive and turned the comptuer off.
-Then I took out my internal hard drive. I did this so the computer does not access the drive for any reason.
-I turned on the computer and booted from the CD.
-There was one partition available on my external hard drive. This partition had about 100GB of the 150GB taken with movies and music. I chose to install Windows to this partition. The external drive is FAT32 file system.
-Windows installed fine and the computer rebooted.

When trying to boot from the USB, the windows splash screen pops up for about 5 seconds and then a blue screen appears saying windows cannot continue to prevent damage to the computer. The error was: STOP: 0x0000007B

I did extensive research on this problem and I am still not sure exactly what is wrong.

Heres what I think. The drivers for the external drive are automatically installed by Windows XP when the drive is plugged in for the first time. Since Windows XP is not running (as it is trying to boot) the drivers are not installed.

I booted from my internal drive and checked my device manager for the drivers. There are 3 drivers total located in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS. disk.sys, drvmcdb.sys, PartMgr.sys. In E:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS, the drvmcdb.sys is missing. So I am assuming this is the driver I need to install. (C is the internal drive and E is the external)

When installing Windows XP, at the initial screen it says press F6 to install third party devices. I think I need to do this however I am required to have a floppy drive to install the drivers. Even if I had this floppy drive I would not know how to make a disk.

I am still not sure if this is the exact solution path I need to follow for this problem but it seems logical.

Thanks for any help in advance.
 
Ok so I found a program called Nlite that will allow me to rip Windows XP to my computer, slipstream drivers, updates, service packs, etc, and then reburn XP. I know the drivers for the external drive are disk.sys, drvmcdb.sys, and PartMgr.sys. But, Nlite only slipstreams .inf files as drivers. Does anyone know how to get the .inf files for the external hard drive?
 
Better Idea.. When you install Windows reformat your hard drive to be an NTFS Partition. If the bios can see that the hard drive is plugged in, and the Windows CD can also see this... then there should be no problem booting it on a computer. I have had Mac OSX 86 on my external and it boots just fine.
 
Thanks for the advice. I will try it as soon as I can borrow someones hard drive to dump the 120 GB of stuff I have on my external before I format it.
 
No I didnt know that. I know there are different filing systems - NTFS, FAT32, etc. but I did not know technically how they work, especially with operating systems. But I guess thats why I posted.

Thanks for the suggestions.
 
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