Boot From USB Drive Question

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Guest

Hopefully someone can help me. I have to install windows 2000 on a hard drive that has to be removed easily at the end of the work day, but i know that you can not boot from an external USB hard drive. I have tried to find a way to get an internal hard drive in a protective enclosure so I can at least set it on top and keep it protected, but all I can find are USB or Firewire connection models. Any ideas? It is for a customer who has sensitive data, and they want to boot from the hard drive but be able to lock it up at night at the same time
Thanks
 
The thing you want is a "removable IDE" drive. At the end of the day you
shutdown and pull it out and lock it away. Next morning you plug it in
and boot up. www.google.com is where to look.
 
rich said:
Hopefully someone can help me. I have to install windows 2000 on a hard
Click to expand...
drive that has to be removed easily at the end of the work day, but i know
that you can not boot from an external USB hard drive. I have tried to find
a way to get an internal hard drive in a protective enclosure so I can at
least set it on top and keep it protected, but all I can find are USB or
Firewire connection models. Any ideas? It is for a customer who has
sensitive data, and they want to boot from the hard drive but be able to
lock it up at night at the same time.
Thanks
Click to expand...

eBay has everything:

http://search.ebay.com/search/searc...t=1&SortProperty=MetaEndSort&ebaytag1=ebayreg

And with some motherboards you can boot from a firewire/USB enclosure, but
the motherboard has to support this option. It's probably not worth a major
hardware swap, but it would work. You'd notice a huge performance hit, and
you'd need special drivers to accomplish this.
 
Bob I has given you the solution. In case it's not immediately evident,
what you're after has 2 parts: an enclosure that mounts permanently in a
front drive bay, and a cartridge that is removable from the enclosure.
The cartridge holds an ordinary hard drive. Installation of the
enclosure and of the drive into the cartridge is trivial. All parts
included; standard form factors.

The assembly will probably have a keylock; mine do. The disk when
inserted is electrically inaccessible unless the key is in the ON
position. The key is removable from any position.

With several assemblies, it's simple to have a complete backup drive in
a drawer.

As I recall the whole assembly (both parts) costs around $35 and you can
find them locally in decent computer stores. No hard drive is included.
 
Dan said:
Bob I has given you the solution. In case it's not immediately evident,
what you're after has 2 parts: an enclosure that mounts permanently in a
front drive bay, and a cartridge that is removable from the enclosure.
The cartridge holds an ordinary hard drive. Installation of the
enclosure and of the drive into the cartridge is trivial. All parts
included; standard form factors.

The assembly will probably have a keylock; mine do. The disk when
inserted is electrically inaccessible unless the key is in the ON
position. The key is removable from any position.

With several assemblies, it's simple to have a complete backup drive in
a drawer.

As I recall the whole assembly (both parts) costs around $35 and you can
find them locally in decent computer stores. No hard drive is included.
Click to expand...

And be sure to have spares on hand. In my experience the
removable drive bay/caddy sets are only good for a few
hundred insert/remove cycles.

For someone I know in a similar situation, I have set him
up with a PCI SATA controller card with an external port,
plus an external SATA hard drive. Two months now of daily
connect/disconnect cycles and so far so good. Only time
will tell me how long this holds up before either the SATA
cable or the port on the SATA controller wears out.

Everything I needed for the external SATA solution is on
one of the pages I bookmarked:
http://www.axiontech.com/srcmfg.php?mfg=HIGH POINT
even though I ordered through a local vendor.
 
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