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