Dual Boot to seperate hard drive

Discussion in 'Software' started by sirdragon, Jul 9, 2005.

  1. sirdragon

    sirdragon Nibble Poster

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    Hiya guru types,

    a little question for you all..

    I am running winxp and winxp pro office.

    I have an external hard drive and I am trying to set it up so that it will run my programmes instead of using my main drive ( as this is faulty and I had to retore it back to factory settings just recenty)

    would this mean that hopefully i could plug in and play my external at work and use my own programmes, though they may need to be set up to accept dual boot maybe???

    I know one can partition the main drive to work as a dual boot, can you do the same with a external drive?

    If you can- how do you copy the MS DOS WINXP reg files etc across, as the laptop didnot come with all these programmes on seperate discs....

    any ideas would be useful

    cheers martin
     
  2. The_Geek

    The_Geek Megabyte Poster

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    Very simular setup to what I have here at home. In my main rig, I have four 250 gig WD drives:
    One is XP Pro and associated programs
    Two is VMware and all my virtual machines
    Three is all my games
    Four is backup

    I think the problem you will run into with an external hd between two machines is that when you install a program, it also copies files to the Windows directory. When you take that hd to another machine and try to run those programs, it's going to look for those files in the Win directory. If the program can't find the files, it's not going to run.

    However, if you install the same program in the same directory on the new machine, it SHOULD be ok.
     
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  3. Fergal1982

    Fergal1982 Petabyte Poster

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    I think the MAIN problem you will encounter with trying to boot to an external drive is that (if its USB, at least), the system wont look for a boot partition on that disk. As i understand it, USB functionality is (at the very least, on most systems) provided by the OS.

    Secondly, even if you could get it to work, and installed a version of windows onto the external HDD. You could have a boot loader which you could set to give you an option to boot from the external drive, But you would have to install that loader onto the work computer too (and if my work is anything to go by, they would hang you for it!)

    Fergal
     
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  4. sirdragon

    sirdragon Nibble Poster

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    So primarily I am F*&%$d then lol,

    I cannot get the machines to recognise the Ex HD as a normal HD,therefore it wont look for a boot....

    even if it found one i would need to have the same progs on the other machine anyhow in order to find the win files......

    pity u cannot get all the relevant progs and files on one drive......

    basically may have to look at setting up a mini network instead...


    cheers for your input guys


    martin
     

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