booting from cd or floppy into usb drive with windows on hd

[abrand88]

Hi,

My bios doesn't support booting from a USB drive. My laptop is a A105 Satellite laptop. Toshiba sells a bootable floppy drive that is bootable. It also has the ability of booting from a cd.
I would like to boot off a floppy or cd and go directly into XP that is on my USB hard drive and not use the internal hard drive.

How can I do it.

Thanks

 

[wolluf]

You'd have to install XP on the usb drive while attached to your machine (you could try editing boot.ini directly to add entry that references the usb drive - but if the XP was installed on another machine it probably won't boot, even if the machine can see the usb drive when its processing boot.ini) - though not sure it would work. Assuming you have XP installed on the internal hard drive, if you boot from the XP install CD and it can 'see' the usb drive, then installing it there should create an entry in the internal hard drive's boot.ini to boot the usb drive. If the install doesn't see the usb drive, then I think you're out of luck.

(if there's an xp install already on the usb drive, and it can be seen, you should get offer to repair it).

btw - why do you want to do this? Doesn't it defeat the object of having a laptop!

 

[abrand88]

Wolluf,

My office will let me use laptop over weekend therefore I wanted to see if I could install XP Pro on the USB drive.

I did what you suggested and my installation not only saw the usb drive but installed the first phase onto the external usb drive. When it rebooted I got a stop error 0000007B (0xF796B640,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)

Maybe it is looking for a special usb driver and I don't know what to use. Might you know of a driver and or why I am getting stop error and I wasn't able to fix the drive when it went into windows recovery mode.

Thanks for your suggestion. It worked and I was amazed that it recognized the external usb drive.

 

[wolluf]

7b's an inaccessible boot device - so you're probably right, XP doesn't have the driver it needs to access the USB device as a boot device. I've never actually tried this (though am now intrigued...), so don't know of any drivers. I suggest you Google, eg

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=install+XP+to+external+usb+drive&btnG=Search&meta=

turns up a number of hits, like

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

which may or may not be useful for you!

 

[abrand88]

Hi,

I went to the Ngine site and found a lot of info on what to modify to get it accessible. I am not sure I feel confident to modify Windows in winiso and create all the additions to the registry. First of all my laptop doesn't have a floppy at all so pressing F6 can't do anything for me. Even if I bought a usb floppy, I would need a universal driver that F6 would recognize. I will look for a driver but I don't have a floppy drive for the laptop. I see that Toshiba is selling a bootable floppy drive but it is $50.00 and unless someone else found and tried a universal driver I have hesitations.

Why don't you try this ? It is certainly interesting and may be of help to you in the future.

I look forward to your thoughts.

thanks a lot. Arthur

 

[wolluf]

I may try this - when I have some spare time!