External Hard Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jawahar Rajan
  • Start date Start date
J

Jawahar Rajan

I have a Sony Laptop PPCG-FXA53 with Win XP home
I would like to use second hard drive with Win 2003 server for development
purposes
Can I link up anexternal hard drive using the USB connection (2.0) How can I
be sure the USB I have is 2.0
Is it possible to have a bootable extranal hard Drive. SO that I can boot
from it if needed

I would like to set up a dual boot.
Can I dual boot from my C drive (which has WinXP home) and have win2003
Server on the external drive

Any help or suggestions are appreciated

Jawahar
 
For any of this to work the BIOS must recognize the USB drive. The BIOS must be capable of booting from the USB drive if you want to do that. If the BIOS will recognize the USB drive but will not boot from it you can still boot from another drive and load the OS from the USB drive.
A hard drive is fast enough that there will be a noticeable reduction is speed if you are using USB1 instead of USB2.
 
Most bios's that I have seen only offer boots on the ide drives, the floppy
drive or the cdrom drive. I have not seen one that could boot to an
external drive. With a second internal drive there is the option to boot to
it by changing the boot sequence in bios and this works good. Say you have
some program that only works with Win.98 or some other earlier system it is
possible to put that OS on an extra internal drive and boot to it then when
you are done and want to boot to the other drive go back into bios and
change the boot sequence again.
 
Many BIOSs have the option to boot from SCSI. This is also handy if you want to boot from a Promise ATA adapter, which emulates SCSI. I looked in my Pentium 3 Soyo motherboard BIOS and discovered that it has options to boot from USB floppy, USB CDROM, and USB hard drive.
 
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