So I just got an external HD for my b-day, I have a few more space now and decided that it'd be a nice idea if I could partition it and install another OS in there and play with it.

My question is, is it possible to install an OS to an external drive, it's USB, and if my lappy would be able to boot up with such drive?

If the BIOS supports a USB boot device, yes. If it doesn't no.

I had an odd experience recently with getting a USB drive with Win7 on it to boot and install on my HDDs. Since you'll probably use a disk for the OS, you might not have the same problems that I encountered though.

How would I know if it does?

Appearently I have USB Floppy, CD ROM and USB External drive booting. The options are there in... what I think would be booting up options but it's more like boot order or something.

Enabling this will make me automatically boot up with said drive or will I get the option of choosing?

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 18 2010, 2:40 am by Corbo.

Booting Windows from a USB drive is a complicated process; since as of Windows Vista the installer will not let you install to a USB drive, and once you do get Windows installed you need to tweak the load order of the USB drivers because the default timing is not early enough at boot. The changes to allow booting from a USB installation of Windows XP or later are all the same, as far as I know. Some of these changes may potentially be reset when you plug in a new USB device or when any of the base USB drivers get updated from Windows updates, making the Windows installation unbootable until you fix it.

How about other OSes, Linux in its oh god so many distros or windows 7?

Puppy linux, for example, can be run off a USB. IIRC, so does ubuntu.

There are some pirated versions of Windows that've been fixed to allow installation to portable media, I would look into torrenting one of those if you want Windows, and after that it's basically the same as installing to a normal drive, and if anything differs, it'll be said in any instructions included with the OS files.

Microsoft could very easily make Windows properly support booting from USB drives by default if they wanted to, because it already can work. I'm not really sure why they don't have it supported by default.

I'm guessing that they predicted that it would influence more piracy than sales, and decided not to officially support USB installations based off of that.

I think you could also use a program like DriveImage XL to copy your partition with Windows on it to your external harddrive.

It has nothing to do with piracy. You would still need to only boot up the USB drive on a single system. Using on other systems it either would not boot on certain systems or if it did boot it would at least need to be activated again because of running it on different hardware. Besides that, if it was an issue, for a long time programs have existed for cloning hard drives anyway.

Oh, I didn't know that. Although I wasn't thinking about using XP on multiple systems from the USB, I was just thinking that people who want to have an OS on a USB drive would pirate XP more often than not for that purpose, rather than actually buying XP for that purpose.

Why do you think they haven't done so though? You think they just haven't thought of it as a priority?

Maybe they don't want to have to explain that you can still only use the Windows installation on one computer.