DescentBB

Well, I have been for some time, hoping to create a work drive for my computer ( a complete 80 gig hard drive, set aside, just for the purpose of work)

I work for a game company by contract right now so I am very carefull about to whom I show my work to. I also am trying to keep spyware, etc from collecting info from my drive or damaging files.

Anyway, I thought I had figured out this really cool idea. My brother told me that it would work perfectly fine.

At the time, I knew full well, that I required an external hard drive for school. I actually figured on a removable drive. So, I bought an 80 Gig removable external USB 2.0 drive.

I figured it would be easy to simply install a fresh copy of Windows on it and set it up to boot when plugged in.

I figured, this way, I have a second computer pretty much that I can unplug from the wall anytime I decide to not use it, and still have my regular system for on-line and on-line gaming. I figured I would plant all my single player games on the external USB drive as well. This drive is actually twice the size of my regular drive because of this.

The problem is that it won't detect the USB exernal drive for some odd reason. So what is the deal? Can I only use this for data storage/transfer? Or is there any way I can put a windows OS on it?


The other ugly aspect is that the drive is pre-formatted and I allready plugged it into the wall to discover that it is pointless. I didn't install their CD-ROM, however nor did I re-format or install anything else but it has been running all night with nothing on it while I've been trying to figure out how to solve this issue. Would I still be able to take it back if there is no way to boot it with a windows OS?

Yes you can take it back. What I'd do is check your BIOS to see if it supports "boot from USB" or something similar. Your best bet is to get a drive caddy and a 80 IDE drive. Then set that one as MASTER on primary IDE so that when you boot with it plugged in, it will boot from that one.

Mess, it's pretty unlikely you'll have a "boot from USB" option in the BIOS. I've certainly never seen one - and for good reason too: booting from USB would be amazingly slow. Your PC would act like a slug.

Unless it's USB 2.0 - the maximum transfer rate is 11mb/s which would mean a boot time of probably 10-20 minutes. Even with USB 2.0, I doubt you'd end up with a usable system.

Merl is right: a drive caddy is the best option: get a caddy for each PC you want to use the drive on....

However, even this will be a nightmare: you'll give poor windows a ★■◆●-fit every time it boots, because it's unlikely there will be many common drivers between both systems. That means you'd end up with untold drivers installed, and I hate to think what the consequences are in that situation.

I think your brother really has no idea it will work "perfectly fine".

While your idea is a nice one, windows is not designed to be hardware agnistic, nor is it designed to be portable between systems.

I don't understand why you'd want to move a system disk anyway! What's so special about a windows install? It's the DATA you're interested in, and not the operating system, so your best idea is to have a smaller disk which just contains work data, and have the programs you use installed on both machines - that way your data is totally portable, and you don't have any worries about the OS.

DOS and linux would be easy.

XP would be a ★■◆●. this might be helpful.