How to boot from an external USB connected drive
Help me with a little info. If the machine's BIOS has the selection, can one boot XP from the external USB connected hard drive?
I know one can image or clone C: to an external drive, but can one boot from this cloned image? I use XXCLONE which is a file by file copying software. I had read once somewhere that Microsoft purposefully made this impossible. You can see from the below quote that I am helping the sister-in-law of a friend to better manage her nice fairly new Gateway, but like a lot of users I am not sure she is up to speed on how to clone or image her C: drive. So, I am suggesting an external drive:
Or, she could employ an exterior USB attached drive, such as your Lacey drive. I am not expert on this, not having actually done it, but I believe this newer motherboard and its BIOS can enable booting and running the machine from an exterior drive. So, she could clone C: to the exterior drive and restore from it should the main hard drive fail. Additionally, these exterior drives are getting quite cheap and one could have more than one of them. One for the operating system, an other for pictures, music, etc. It is dangerous to store too much in one place, on just the C: drive. All hard drives fail, eventually!
Can one boot from them? Thanks for your help.
Dick |
