external drive as bootable drive

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

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Comments

dynamik

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.

nanga

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 ?

dynamik

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.

Ricka182

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....