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Topic: External Hard Drive |
Sonny Jenkins
From:
Texas Masonic Retirement Center,,,Arlington Tx
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Posted 31 Jan 2011 7:09 am |
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| Is it possible,,or practicle,,to have a complete (?) other OS on an external HD? I mean,,,could you install say XP on a hard drive and have eveything on it that you would have on your "base" computer? Is this far fetched??? I mean,,,why can we just save certain things on a external HD? |
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Jack Stoner
From:
Kansas City, MO
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Posted 31 Jan 2011 7:35 am
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Depends on the computer on whether you can boot an OS from an external USB connected drive. You best option is to have two internal hard drives and then have the dual boot option. Most computers have the hardware port for a second hard drive. Depending on what is inside, if it's SATA you probably will need a data cable, at minimum. If it's PATA (IDE) usually the ribbon connector has two data connections. You will also need power, but that usually is there or you can "Y" off of one power connector for two drives.
If you want to run XP on a new/newer Win 7 machine you may run into problems finding Windows XP drivers for all the hardware, and if that's the case it won't work. Generally, most Windows XP software will run in Win 7, as it's more compatible than Vista was.
Another option, if you have Win 7 Professional, you can run a Virtual XP within Win 7. |
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Chris Dorch
From:
Wisconsin, USA
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Posted 31 Jan 2011 7:29 pm
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It's not far fetched. People do it all the time. The problem with running an OS from an external drive is speed. If you have a slow hard drive, it gets compounded by using a slow connector like USB.
Most people who run separate OS's on external drives are gound to use eSata which has transfer rate double to quadruple the speed of USB.
Another issue is that you cannot create a swap file (pagefile) on a USB disk. This file is key for Windows memory management. Without a swapfile, performance will take a nose dive.
Lastly, as was stated above, you need a BIOS that allows boot from USB or an eSata controller card that supports booting.
Depending upon your application of the other OS, you can use Virtual PC or some other type of virtualization software to emulate another machine. However, that's not necessarily for the common, everyday user. Virtual XP (mode) in Windows 7 uses virtualization.
Hope this usless bit of info helps! |
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Ron Page
From:
Penn Yan, NY USA
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Posted 2 Feb 2011 9:07 am
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With XP Professional you can create an entire system backup. You wouldn't boot from the external, but you boot from an Automatic System Recovery disk (floppy or CD) and it would reload your entire system, with all installed programs and settings intact. It's useful if your hard drive crashes.
If you have basic XP it is possible to install the backup utility, but it takes some work and I believe you need the original installation disk.
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HagFan
Emmons Lashley LeGrande II |
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Wiz Feinberg
From:
Mid-Michigan, USA
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Posted 2 Feb 2011 6:41 pm
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| Ron Page wrote: |
With XP Professional you can create an entire system backup. You wouldn't boot from the external, but you boot from an Automatic System Recovery disk (floppy or CD) and it would reload your entire system, with all installed programs and settings intact. It's useful if your hard drive crashes.
If you have basic XP it is possible to install the backup utility, but it takes some work and I believe you need the original installation disk. |
You are describing an image backup that contains everything on the backed up drive. This is different from a standard file system backup, such as is provided in Windows XP.
I have had Windows XP Professional for years and it does not contain an image back-up, such as you described; just the standard System State or file backups. Windows "image" backups first appeared in certain versions of Windows Vista, not XP.
Acronis True Image, which I am affiliated with, does save complete recoverable system images, with the OS, all activations, files, settings and programs installed.
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