Re: Using External USB hard disk for booting Win2k

Thanks for the replies.
Does this same shortcoming exists with windows xp also?
Also i same another topic in this group at

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage/browse_thread/thread/58ba373c4ca448d8/4fcd24df6f592a19?lnk=st&q=boot.ini+entry&rnum=1#4fcd24df6f592a19

this person was successfull in booting from an external had disk.
Pls let me know your comments
Thanks
Anshuman

Arno Wagner wrote:
Previously Anshu2000 <jain.anshu2000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,


I have a dell inspiron 1405 laptop. I have Windows media center edition
installed on the same. I wish to buy an external hard disk only if I
can install win2k on that and then boot from the it. Is this possible?
will the installation be straight forward or something special has to
be done?
I wish to use the external disk for win2k server only

This could be difficult or impossible. The problem is that while your
BIOS may (or may not) support booting, the OS also has to support
reading the drive very early in the boot-process. With Linux, you
could statically compile the USB-driver into the kernel, which in
turn gets loaded by the original boot loader. Or you could put it
into a ramdisk-image that is attached to the kernel.

However, AFAIK, there is no way to embed the USB driver into the file
the boot loader loads in win2k and so win2k will try to read the
driver from disk and naturally fail.

Arno

.

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