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Can I Disable Internal Hard Drive and boot from External Hard Drive with USB

post #1 of 5
12/24/05 at 7:21am
Thread Starter 
I have an Acronis Backup Image of my 60GB Toshiba cloned onto a USB linked 3.5 external hard drive and I want to test drive it. Rather than find out it doesn’t work when it’s my lifeline. (If my original HD crashed I would copy the Acronis image onto another 2.5 then install it.) Can I disable my internal hard drive, preferably in bios and run my 9300 from the 3.5 external hard drive that has the exact clone of the internal hard drive on it? If this is possible, but I do have to physically disconnect my internal hard drive first please warn me about how I can screw that up because I have never pulled a notebook hard drive before. Thanks Meta
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post #2 of 5
12/24/05 at 9:25am
Nope, Windows will not run off a USB drive - it can boot off one but you won't get much further.

John
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post #3 of 5
12/24/05 at 10:26am
Try and burn the image across multiple CD/DVD-Rs and make sure the disks are bootable.

Sorry, I'm a Ghostaholic, so I'm not sure if the idea above will work in your scenario.
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post #4 of 5
12/24/05 at 11:19am
I don't think that idea would work with Ghost either - you can't run the images off the multiple DVD/CD's, you would have to use them to restore to the hard drive which is not what is needed here, the poster wants to try the image without restoring to the internal hard drive.

John
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post #5 of 5
12/24/05 at 5:59pm
Meta... look for WinXPe (e = embedded). You can create bootable and operable WinXP images that will run on any flash or usb media you desire and it takes the components from your legally owned version of WinXP (so if you have home, get expect to build an XP Pro drive).

Do your Googling and enjoy the fun in building your own custom WinXP OS. =)
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