[vox-tech] Booting From External Device

[Jeff Newmiller]

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003, Richard Y wrote:

> I have tried taken out my internal HD (WinXP Pro) and put it in the
> external case, modified the BIOS to boot from external USB device
> first, and tried to boot it up with it. Not a chance! Because I am
> getting mix info from the web that some people said it's doable. And
> all I have to do is to get the BIOS to support external USB device and
> set it to boot with it first. I figure it would be very cool if that
> were possible. We virtually have a mobile desktop. Is that wonderful!
> So is that means we can=92t boot from memory stick or external CD Rom?

I have never done this, but I can see problems.

BIOS only runs the MBR bootstrap code... a very tiny program. You have to
inform that code where to go next to load the code that actually
loads the operating system.  If you simply remove a disk and put it
in a different place, the MBR code can't find the real loader.  I don't
know anything about configuring the loader used with XP, so you would have
to dig for that.

Once you have loaded the OS, the configuration files or registry may
include references to where the old disk was.  On Linux, you can usually
fix these references with a rescue disk because they are few and far
betweeen (mostly fstab), but I think it would be virtually impossible to
do in a Windows registry... direct references are everywhere.

Thus, with Windows you would have to do a clean install on the storage
device in place to be able to run it from there.

> I would like to do this with Windows XP, Linux and Mac OS X. Please give =
some ideas.

I'll bite... what single hardware platform do you plan to run these on?

> fastmoney

What is this... spam? :)

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