Portable dual boot

kookooshortman55

kookooshortman55

New Member
I was wondering if it was possible to dual boot with a portable hard drive. I only have one internal SATA drive but I wanted to dual boot the Windows 7 Beta on my portable hard drive. Would this still work? It's a USB interface.
 
kookooshortman55 said:
I was wondering if it was possible to dual boot with a portable hard drive. I only have one internal SATA drive but I wanted to dual boot the Windows 7 Beta on my portable hard drive. Would this still work? It's a USB interface.
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Yer it does work if it can be done on a Pen drive then yes i am positive it would work on the external but im not to sure how you would go about doing it since i have not tried anything like this before but i know it can be done :)
 
Install windows 7 on your External (might need a format which you will loose all data unless you back it up) and if your motherboard can support booting up to a USB device (check bios) change the boot priority to something like 1st device: CD Drive 2nd Device: USB 3rd Device: Hard Drive (or at least just make sure the USB is before the hard drive) then when it is pluged in it will boot to that.
 
Oh okay, well I have the Windows 7 Iso file burned to DVD and I tried booting from CD. So to install a second operating system, not just upgrade the one I have now, I would need to put the Windows 7 DVD into the CD drive and then have it boot from CD with USB boot second?

I checked the BIOS and USB is an option to boot, I just thought you had to boot from CD. And yes, we have the whole computer backed up on this drive so it's not empty, would it be wise to partition the external drive and install 7 on the blank partition?
 
No, you can't live boot from a USB drive.

Yes, you can INSTALL from a USB drive.

What you'll need to do is what I just did last night.
Partition your current drive into two sections and
install Windows 7 on the second partition.
 
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