external drive as bootable drive

nangananga Member Posts: 201
today the hdd of my old laptop went kapput... it died of old age :) ..... I tried installing XP on it where I got the message that my hdd was not detected and its making some funny physcial noise.

Well i am looking for an opinion .... my bios still works .. can i make an external hdd as the hdd of my laptop and install win XP on it and use it as a booting drive

Comments

  • dynamikdynamik Banned Posts: 12,312 ■■■■■■■■■□
    Does your BIOS allow you to boot off of external drives? The only OS I tried to do this with was Server 2008, and it yelled at me because it detected it was a USB and said that wasn't supported. It was a bit frustrating since I just wanted to play around with it and not have to deal with partition my drive in my laptop.
  • nangananga Member Posts: 201
    YES BIOS allows me to choose bootable sequence. But again .... I would have to choose CD with XP...and try installing it on the external drive. Would the external drive be detected during the installation ?
  • dynamikdynamik Banned Posts: 12,312 ■■■■■■■■■□
    Possibly. You can also supply drivers via F6 floppies or include burn a new installation ISO with nLite and embed the drivers in that. Server 2008/Vista are much better about detecting things like that than Server 2003/XP.
  • Ricka182Ricka182 Member Posts: 3,359
    Make sure it's plugged in before you power it on, and see what happens. There's no telling if your bios will see the drive....
    i remain, he who remains to be....
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