Installing XP on an external USB drive

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Guest

I have a computer that supports booting from a USB device. I decided that it
would like to keep my current version of XP home on my C drive and install a
new version of XP pro on the external drive. Pro would become my main
operating system and if required I could use the XP home as a backdoor in
case my Pro became corrupted in some way.
When I tried installing XP pro to the external drive it went through some
file copies and then one of two things would happen. A blue screen or a
message stating that XP could not be installed on the disk I wanted to use.
Anybody have any suggestions? That is aside from using Virtual PC or VMware
since this would still make me dependant on one OS.

Thank you
 
Forget it. No matter what your BIOS allows, you cannot install Windows to an
external USB device. To do what you wish, you can create another partition
on your internal drive and install XP Pro on it and use a Boot Manager.
Gene K
 
Why do you want to do this? It will not gain you anything at all, and will
just complicate your system unnecessarily.
 
Everyday, there is a post for this very topic. And every time, the answer is:

For USB, Firewire and Parallel : you can not install any version of XP on to
these type of external/removable drives.

For SCSI, SATA and eSATA: These type of drives are not considered
external/removable hard drive. They appear as internal drive and XP will
install onto these.
 
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