External Hard Drive for Installing OS?

[stan412]

Hi,

This is rather sort of a noob question--bear with me:

I had an old hard drive laying around, and I think I may have heard that you could install an OS on an external hard drive. If true, how can an OS boot from an external drive? When formatting, do I use Windows to format, then select the "Primary Partition" option? I was thinking about installing maybe even a non-Windows OS, like Ubuntu Linux or Mac OS X...
If this can be done, I would very much appreciate the steps to make this happen, thanks!

 

[KenSingleton]

Hi stan412!
Yes you can boot an operating system from an external hard drive, or indeed a USB Flash Pen.
Assuming the external hard drive connects via a USB port then you need to make sure that Removable devices are enabled in the BIOS, and that it is first in the Boot sequence in the BIOS. Then you just have your Windows Operating CD (or whatever op system you want) in the drive and it should install as normal. XP will detect all your hard drives and partitions and then you choose which one you want to install it on.
Hope this helps. Ken.

 

[mike99]

USB2 would be a bit slow! To be fast, you need SATA drive on e-SATA connection.

Mike.