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Old June 9th 12, 03:47 AM posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware,microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Paul
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Posts: 18,275
Default Is it possible to install Windows XP Pro. SP3, with its bootableslipstreamed CD, into an external USB2 HDD?

Paul wrote:
Ant wrote:
On 6/7/2012 12:27 PM PT, Paul typed:
You'll probably be a lot older, and have gray hairs, before
you get that working :-) But, it's possible.


Ha. I already have those! :-P

"Disconnect any other hard disk drives (internally) from it" ... Is
this really required? Again, I am disabled to open case and go inside
my computer. :-(


This is purely up to you. I've had enough "accidents", like
needing do a "fixmbr", to consider it easier to just disconnect
any disks I don't want damaged, than to clean up a mess later.

You can probably work your way out of any problem later,
using brain rather than brawn. It's a lot easier for
me to pull the cables, because the side is always off
the computer. I'm just waiting now, for the connectors
to wear out.

Note that, not even the BIOS settings for disks work. There
is a "disable" per drive in a lot of BIOS setup screens, but
stupid Linux will re-enable the drives, and then they can get
written to by GRUB during an install. So the computer is
pretty defenseless in that regard. Only the "write protect"
jumper on the old SCSI drives, works worth a damn. That would
stop anything from writing, but still allow you to read drives.
It's the kind of thing, you could connect up a switch and place it
on the front panel.

Paul


To give an example of the strange things that can happen,
consider my Win2K install attempt yesterday.

The disk had a single primary partition, with C: containing Win2K.

I wanted to install a second copy of the OS, clean, with no CODECs
in it. So I could reproduce a problem with "dvdplay.exe".

When I went to install, instead of making a new complete partition,
marking it active, the installer decided instead, to keep the existing
C: as the "boot" solution. So the first partition remained the one
with the active boot flag. The OS installed into a second partition,
with the letter "E:". So my new install wasn't on C:. The first partition
handles the boot duties. The second partition doesn't have a
complete set of files either. The pagefile and hiberfil are on
the first partition. Quite possibly the boot.ini is as well.

This made things annoying when installing drivers, because I'd have to
remember that my new partition was E: and not C:.

The installer also made the second partition, a "logical" partition
in an extended. So the partition table had a FAT32 primary partition
for the original C:, plus an extended in which a single logical partition
E: was located. I could undo that with Partition Magic, without
breaking anything. But I stopped there, and didn't attempt to make
the second partition the booting partition. Wasn't worth the trouble,
and I was afraid of messing up a partition drive letter dependency
along the way.

So all sorts of things can happen when you do an install, and
what happened there, wasn't what I wanted at all. But since that
wasn't a long term setup, it won't be around to annoy me for much
longer. And it didn't break the original C:, which still works.

Paul
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