XP on External Hardrive

[ssc456]

hi,

recently bought new laptop with windows vista on it comapq presario c500 1 gig RAM 80 gig hardrive 128MB graphics celeron M processor

and it boots up and runs ok with vista on it but i am having lots of driver issues as expected with a new OS but there a lots of programs with driver issues i still need to use . NERO . ANYDVD just to name a couple but i have a 250GB external hardrive and was wondering how to go about installing xp on the hardrive and booting from external.

now i have tried the obvious try install xp and when it ask when to install it point it to external and it will not install comes up with error message .
something like cannot acces drive . will post message later.

so any tips or advice on installing windows XP on an external hardrive.

thanks for all help in advanced.

Scott

 

[Raffaz]

You will only be to do this if your BIOS supports booting up an external drive. Heres a guide
http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

 

[dude_se]

cant you just create a new partition on your hdd? ... xp only takes up about 1.5gb so a 2.5gb partition at most should sort you out

 

[Raffaz]

2.5gb???? what about updates and stuff lol

 

[dude_se]

2.5gb???? what about updates and stuff lol

i thought he just wanted it to run nero and some other stuff lol, not use it all the time, therefore he could just fk the updates. i would personally make a bigger partition, maybe around 10gb, but 2.5gb min should get you going, thats the bare min really.

 

[ssc456]

so if i was to create a new partition using something like partition magic would that format it so that xp could be installed ?

i could make the partition upto about 30 GB. i have a fair knoledge of software and hardware but never used any partition software or booted from external so i dont suppose any1 has a 'Idiots Guide' or soemthing

once again thanks for all posts.

Scott

 

[Raffaz]

Theres a guide in my other post mate

 

[dude_se]

yea just use partition magic and create a logical ntfs partition. the xp setup will do the rest

 

[ssc456]

hi again,

i formatted the hardrive and booted the xp disk it went through to copying files needed for install and then it reboots and says operating system failure.

tried following the guide in previous post but cabdsk would not recognise maybe coz i have vista ??.

n e ways n e ideas on operating system failure or failed to boot operating system ??

thanks

Scott

 

[brianmay27]

did you try editing the boot loader? in vista (supposing it is the same) go to my controle panel, system, advance, and startup and recovery then hit edit. copy and past the last line which should look something like this.

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="vista" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

Paste it below that line and change the partition(1) to partition(2) or 3 depends if you have a recovery partition. save and try again.