Vista external USB boot

has anyone gotten Vista to boot from and external USB hard drive?  i have not looked to deep into why it dosn't work for me but if other people have gotten it to work then i can put more time into it.

Update your bios drivers. If your board is new enough it will support boot via USB.

Or otherwise your need to create a boot-floppy set and do so that way. But it requires a fair few disks to do.

Manip wrote:

Update your bios drivers. If your board is new enough it will support boot via USB.

Or otherwise your need to create a boot-floppy set and do so that way. But it requires a fair few disks to do.

the bios works find. i am asking if anyone got vista to boot to a USB hard drive.  i don't like to use virtual PCs so i load up the OS on the USB drive and boot to it.

Vista's detects my USB HDD without a hitch when booting off the DVD, however after the first reboot when setup tries to load from the HD I get a BSOD. I cant remember the error but I think it had to do with Vista not recognizes a SCSI or RAID adapter. I last tried it with 5270, I havent yet to try installing 5308 to a USB HDD.

Jason Cox wrote:

Vista's detects my USB HDD without a hitch when booting off the DVD, however after the first reboot when setup tries to load from the HD I get a BSOD. I cant remember the error but I think it had to do with Vista not recognizes a SCSI or RAID adapter. I last tried it with 5270, I havent yet to try installing 5308 to a USB HDD.

same problem i have. maybe it will be corrected in new builds after 5308

Its not supposed to work. Vista will only support a non-removeable drive for the system partition.
 
If you managed to install onto a removeable disk it would probably be considered a bug in the installer that allowed the install to go ahead.

I wish i had read this earlier today before going out and buying a usb hard drive for exactly this purpose! [C]

nswan wrote:

I wish i had read this earlier today before going out and buying a usb hard drive for exactly this purpose!

Well, at least you now have a good external drive you can use as a backup device. Anyone who has any data they think is important should have one anyway.

My favorite way of installing 2 OSes is to just hook up a second harddrive as slave and install the OS on it while the primary master is disconnected. With my Asus P4C800-E motherboard it lets me press F8 at startup which gives me a boot menu screen.
I just choose what drive I want to boot from WITHOUT having to mess with boot loaders and messing up master boot records

I'm considering buying and downloading Partion Magic and just using my main hard drive, or breaking open the external drive and seeing if i can install the hard drive as a normal internal one!

Technicaly though it's possible, you just have to give Vista the right drivers, it'd be just like booting off a SCSI or RAID card from what I've read, both of which will give you a BSOD if you dont have the right drivers.

nswan wrote:

I'm considering buying and downloading Partion Magic and just using my main hard drive, or breaking open the external drive and seeing if i can install the hard drive as a normal internal one!

If it's a full sized model it should just have a regular harddrive inside it. There's no reason why you couldn't just remove it from the case and stick it on a free IDE connector inside your computer.

If your motherboard has that handy boot menu like mine it'll be even easier. I've never been daring enough to mess with Partition Magic, just using 2 separate drives  and disconnecting one while I install the OS is the absolute safest way to go.

I tried the same method that works for XP to boot Vista from USB but didn't get it to work. Someone might have got it to work though, recommend to look into the first link here.

Couldnt you install onto a physical, internal drive... then remove the drive and put it into an external and boot from that? (The final step putting back the original internal?)

This is all considering you have an external that accepts an internal drive(I currently do have one that uses a laptop HDD and I COULD swap them back and forth on my laptop, havent tried this though).

dentaku wrote:

nswan wrote: I'm considering buying and downloading Partion Magic and just using my main hard drive, or breaking open the external drive and seeing if i can install the hard drive as a normal internal one!

If it's a full sized model it should just have a regular harddrive inside it. There's no reason why you couldn't just remove it from the case and stick it on a free IDE connector inside your computer.

If your motherboard has that handy boot menu like mine it'll be even easier. I've never been daring enough to mess with Partition Magic, just using 2 separate drives  and disconnecting one while I install the OS is the absolute safest way to go.

The point of getting an external hard drive (usb) is to not install the hard drive inside

I would also like to be able to install vista on an external usb drive so I could show people the beta on there computers without installing vista

I dont have a link, but someone has found out how to install XP on an USB drive (it required modifying some stuff on the install CD, dont know if it's legal though), maybe their work can help you install Vista on a USB drive.

I know awhile back someone in MS blogged about why XP wouldnt install on a USB drive, it was a good read, if anyone knows the article or has a link, can you post it here?

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/09/windows_in_your_pocket/index.html

Thanks Spoofnoozle for the link.
I thought you could only boot it from a usb external hard drive.
Thanks

spoofnozzle wrote:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/09/windows_in_your_pocket/index.html

http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=80811

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/15/113811.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2576431

www.wdc.com/en/library/usb/2079-001050.pdf

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Q_20983648.html

http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/windows_OS_installation.asp

http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm