boot from external usb hard drive ?

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Scottie3k

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Good day all,

I have a littel issue that I'm hoping someone can resove 4 me.

I have a Dell Latitude D610 laptop with WinXP Pro installed with SP2, and it has USB2. I removed the harddrive and put in another one, formated and installed XP Pro in FAT32 on it with SP2, then installed all the drivers. Pull out the new harddrive and put it into a external USB2 harddrive enclosure. I put back my original harddrive into my laptop, set my BIOS sequence to boot from USB first and let it run.

My problem is, once the black XP screen with little blue progress bar starts, it will stay on the screen for about 10 seconds max and reboot itself, then give me the boot options, i.e. safe mode, normal, etc ... I select normal, and same thing over and over again. I also trien safe mode, and it does start to lead files, and stops half way throught, then reboots ...

Any ideas ?

Thank you very much in advance to all !
 
when you install windows it keeps a database of the hardware it was orginally installed with , and you moved it to an external box so a part of that database has changed.. and in alot of such cases a reinstall is necessary and as you alredy know it really is impossible to reinstall windows to an external hd you gotta take it out of the external box so.. just forget about running windows from an external hd

JohnnyX said:
You Intalled XP on FAT32 ? I don't think this is possible..
very possible , windows xp can be installed on a fat32 partition without issues , however the windows xp setup is limited it allows fat32 only for partitions upto 32gb in size anything higher than that automatically goes ntfs, however its possible to create partitions higher then 32gb as fat32 with many 3rd party partition managers

Scottie3k said:
should it be on NTFS ? I had read that it would only work in FAT.
thats a matter of personal preference (the biggest advantage of ntfs is the maximum file size its unlimited but with fat32 its limited to 4gb ,also ntfs is compatible/read+write only with nt based os's nt/2k/xp/2k3/vista but fat32 is universally compatible/read+write with any windows+it have perfect read/write support in linux os's) , and it will work eitherway
 
I removed the internal (original) drive and plugged in my external USB drive, which is a 6GB. I booted from the install CD and it formatted, partitioned and installed the files on the USB drive, but when that was done and the time came to boot it to continue install and configure, it died on me. For the life of me I can't figure out why it will not boot from the external drive.

Any more ideas ?
 
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