External Hard Disk Booting

[Andrew80]

Dear all,
i'm trying for several days now to install another vista operating system on an external hard disk , connected via USB to my VGN-AR41L. Even if there is an option for external USB drive in bios settings, none drive is recognized at the booting procedure. I wan't to use my laptop for many different application which i don't want them to be all installed in one operating system. Thanks for your help.

[Blencogo]

Hi Andrew,

As far as I am aware Vista will only support a non-removeable drive for the system partition so you won't be able to install Vista on a USB Drive. Even trying to connect a second drive by IDE as a slave just to achieve the installation seems to cause a BSOD - probably a driver problem.

USB is treated as a read-only device during installation and would need new USB drivers for this to work. I know it should work in theory given the right drivers but I don't know anyone who has achieved it in practice. Microsoft say it is not possible with any Windows system.

Looks like someone has managed it with XP - see here: -

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=142703

[Andrew80]

Thanks a lot for your info. They were very usefull to me.