Install Win-XP to USB-drive?

Posted by: mlord

Install Win-XP to USB-drive? - 27/10/2005 23:39

So I'm about to repartition my notebook computer's main drive. I'd like to get rid of WinXP Home (almost) completely from it, leaving (nearly) the whole 100GB for Kubuntu Linux.

But I do use WinXP for BIOS upgrades, and for PhotoshopCS.

So, I'd like to install the WinXP Home to an external USB2 hard drive I have here, and just plug it in when needed. The BIOS knows how to boot from USB drives, no problem.

And during my first attempt at this, WinXP Home thought it knew how to install itself to this device, by demanding a small boot partition on the main notebook drive (fine by me). It installed ntldr and a couple of other tiny files there, and put everything else onto the USB drive.

But on the first reboot after setup finished copying the first set of files, it shows the windows splash screen, thinks for several long seconds, and then gives me a BSOD with some silly message about having detected a critical fault with my drive or something.

So.. is this doable? Anyone know how to tweak it?

I'm guessing that it needs the USB drivers on that tiny boot partition, so that ntldr can then find and boot the main drive. But what do I know.

Cheers
Posted by: blitz

Re: Install Win-XP to USB-drive? - 28/10/2005 01:44

I read something about this in some mag recently. did a quick Google search and came up with this . Boot from a flash drive. Check out the link to the Bart PE Builder. Dont know if it will help or not.

The article was hinting at taking your desktop with you on a thumb drive.
Posted by: mlord

Re: Install Win-XP to USB-drive? - 29/10/2005 00:28

Mmm.. that's cool. Not exactly what I was looking for, but the tips therein oughta help.


thanks!
Posted by: muzza

Re: Install Win-XP to USB-drive? - 29/10/2005 23:20

in the same way that windows needs drivers to boot off anything that isn't IDE compatible, wouldn't you need drivers for the ESB drive?
Posted by: gbeer

Re: Install Win-XP to USB-drive? - 30/10/2005 02:22

If the BIOS is smart enough to get the boot record from a USB drive - that's all that's needed to get things rolling. From there it's all down hill.
Posted by: mlord

Re: Install Win-XP to USB-drive? - 05/06/2006 13:49

Okay, many months later, I found this How-To description for modifying the WinXP install CD so that it just works when the target is a USB drive.

And.. it just worked for me. Fiddly to do the mods -- needed an ISO image editor, and I couldn't find one for Linux. But I did find a cracked copy of a Windows based tool that did the job for me (inside a throwaway VMware snapshot).

And one has to ensure that the external USB target disk is the *only* disk in the system during the install, as otherwise the XP installer still puts the bootloader onto the wrong drive.

So I now have a WinXP installer CD that also happens to work for USB install targets, plus a 60GB external bootable USB drive with XP on it, along with DVDShrink, DVDDecrypter, and PhotoShopCS (my three most used Winapps).

Cheers
Posted by: tman

Re: Install Win-XP to USB-drive? - 05/06/2006 17:38

Quote:
And.. it just worked for me. Fiddly to do the mods -- needed an ISO image editor, and I couldn't find one for Linux. But I did find a cracked copy of a Windows based tool that did the job for me (inside a throwaway VMware snapshot).

You should be able to do most of it using just mkisofs if you can work out a way of extracting the boot floppy image from the ISO. The normal Windows XP CD doesn't do anything special apart from having the boot image embedded in it. It is only the MSDN versions which do tricks like linking multiple files to the same data which allows it to put all the versions onto a single disc.
Posted by: mlord

Re: Install Win-XP to USB-drive? - 05/06/2006 18:41

Quote:

You should be able to do most of it using just mkisofs if you can work out a way of extracting the boot floppy image from the ISO.


Therein is the "trick". The SP2 disc I have does not use "floppy emulation" for booting.. it uses some other scheme, and accesses "regular" files in the ISO image portion of the CD when booting. Or at least I think that's what I saw when disecting it.

Cheers
Posted by: Roger

Re: Install Win-XP to USB-drive? - 05/06/2006 19:24

Quote:
...extracting the boot floppy image from the ISO.


Or, if you can get hold of a copy of WinPE, you can use the ETFSBOOT.COM file that's included with that as a boot image for almost all Windows XP and Windows 2003 ISO images. I've done this in the past rather than use IsoBuster (I think) to break out the boot image from the CD.