Can Vista be installed on an external USB hard drive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chris
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Chris

Can Vista be installed on an external USB hard drive?

A friend has a laptop with a 20GB HDD.
Could he install Vista on his external drive without messing up XP on
his main drive?

Would it have to be a dual-boot system, with the bootloader on C:?
 
Can Vista be installed on an external USB hard drive?

A friend has a laptop with a 20GB HDD.
Could he install Vista on his external drive without messing up XP on
his main drive?

Would it have to be a dual-boot system, with the bootloader on C:?
Click to expand...


No
 
Chris said:
Is that a "no" to the first question?
Is there any way for him to try Vista?
Click to expand...

Vista cannot be installed on an external USB hard drive.
 
On an internal hard drive.

--

Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Rock writes
Is that a "no" to the first question?
Is there any way for him to try Vista?
Click to expand...

Vista can't be booted from an external drive. Of course he can try vista.
There are several options.

1. Buy another internal drive, take the first one out, install the new
drive and install vista.
2. Image/clone the current internal drive to an external drive, then
install vista, either clean install or upgrade, on the internal drive to try
it out. Then restore the image or clone when done.
3. Buy a larger hard drive, copy the old to the new, then dual boot with XP
and Vista. Make sure the drive is imaged so that the XP installation can be
restored if something goes wrong during the installation of Vista.
 
Also, you can try with a virtual machine solution.

That is, everything now should not be changed. Just setup a virtual server
2005 R2 into your current Windows XP Professional, and then install Vista as
a guest os.
 
Chris said:
Is that a "no" to the first question?
Is there any way for him to try Vista?
Click to expand...

What are the other hardware specs, such as memory? A laptop old enough to
come with a 20 Gb HD may have other hardware limitations that make running
Vista impractical.
 
I haven't tried it but I've heard of someone installing Vista on an external
drive as a virtual machine. You would install Virtual PC (or Server) in XP
on the internal hard drive and then setup a virtual machine on the external
drive.
 
A laptop that came with a 20 gig hard drive is likely to be way under
powered to virtualize anything!

--

Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Yes, that's it.

But it is also correct according to what Richard said regarding the
performance of Chris's laptop. :)
 
Hi all,

I just finished doing this...First installed Virtual PC 2007 beta, created a
virtual machine on my USB drive, then just dragged the ios file onto the cd
icon, voila! Installing the new Office as we speak.
The only issue I have is that I can't use my wireless nic (drivers won't
load), but I suspect that I may have to disable it in XP before I can use it
in Vista...hopefully I'll figure that one out soon!

Phil
 
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