Possible to Boot From External Hardrive

[simonstevens35]

Hi,
I have firewire exernal hardrive. Would it be possible to use the external hard drive for a seperate OS partition in a dual boot up system? (So one of the the OS is on internal drive, the other on the external drive?

Thanks,

simonstevens35

 

[garebo]

I believe you can, but you have to make the hard drive partition active. YOu can do that thru disk management, i believe.
Also, i believe you have to make sure your motherboard is equipped to boot from an external drive, so look in your bios or your mobo manual or the mfgrs website.



Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[wolluf]

To boot from an external drive you do need the bios to have that feature (ie, the external device type has to appear in the list of bootable options in the bios settings).

However, you might be able to dual boot using a 3rd party boot manager even if the external drive isn't directly bootable in the bios - as the boot manager may be able to set up an entry in its boot menu for the external device (for the one I use -

http://www.boot-us.com

- if it can see it as bootable partition in windows it will allow you to add it to boot menu). I haven't tried this - have stopped experimenting with dual boot, tend to use vmware to load 'virtual' o/s instead now.

 

[garebo]

Since you are pointing out other options to dual-boot then i might point out that an extra hard drive and a removable ide or sata unit would accomplish the same.
Thats what i use, removable ide. I have one computer with win 2k and 2 separate win xp pro, plus a longhorn, all on separate hard drives and i use them with the removable ide unit, works great for me and less problems and less downtime.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips