Dual Boot On External Hard Drive
Mar 23, 2008
I read in the news, this past January, that MSFT was not going to support XP after June 30, 2008. I don't remember the extent of support downside. My concern was that I wanted to be ready and updated. I like having the latest gadgets, especially if helps organize my life. I had the machine to upgrade on, too. I have a HP Media Center PC, Pentium D (dual), and a decent and adequate graphics card. I souped it up to 3.5GB RAM and added a PCI slot for SATA connection. I added the SATA connection because I had just purchased a 750GB external hard drive. I got it for storage and back up. At the time I did not know I could do a dual boot install. I found that out on HP's site.
So I thought that would be the best choice for me, in case Vista did not work out. That made me feel a lot better about the transition. As I started to do the dual set up, I saw my new external drive there with all that room and thought, why not see what happens?????! It???s been a little rocky, I have to say. I like Vista now that the serious stuff is behind me. Microsoft was very helpful. I still lose my connection when I connect through my router.My never ending anxiety is this. Did I do the right thing? Is my external drive sturdy enough to handle the rigors of the Operating System drive? The tech guys said it could not be done. I went ahead and tried and it DID work. I worry that the drive is going to crash. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? The external drive is Western Digital MY Book Home Edition, 750GB, USB, FireWire and SATA connections. The RAID PCI slot I installed is 1.50mbs. I had no PCI express available that would have given it 3mbs. (I think I have the standards right, if not, I bet most who know understand.)The graphics was installed there....
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Mar 23, 2008
is it unheard of to dual-boot Vista x64 on a dual-core computer with x32 on an external drive (same software package)?
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May 7, 2008
I am curious if Vista can be run from one of those portable external hard drives that I see in Staples, etc. rather than have to install another internal hard drive. I want to dual-boot with XP (already installed on an internal HD) and it would also be great if I can bring that external HD with us when we travel and hook it up to my wife's XP laptop and be able to boot up in Vista too. We need something for testing our software in Vista.
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Aug 26, 2008
I am planning on putting ubuntu on an external hard drive. If I install Ubuntu on it, can I boot to it? I don't want to change any settings in bios, I just want to boot to ubuntu occasionally.
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May 18, 2008
Here is my situation: I have XP installed on a SATA drive in a computer I just put together (AMD x2 5600+, ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe, 2Gig Ram) and I want to install another SATA drive with Vista Ultimate 64 bit and I want the ability to dual-boot like some people do when they have 2 operating systems on the same drive but in different partitions. I originally install Vista Ultimate 64 bit as the O/S but it was incompatible with many of the programs I use so I installed XP Pro.Otherwise I liked Vista.
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May 7, 2008
I am curious if Vista can be run from one of those portable external hard drives that I see in Staples, etc... rather than have to install another internal hard drive. I want to dual-boot with XP (already installed on an internal HD) and it would also be great if I can bring that external HD with us when we travel and hook it up to my wife's XP laptop and be able to boot up in Vista too. We need something for testing our software in Vista.
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Feb 19, 2010
i just got my 500gb Seagate drive back after it bricked from the little firmware issue they had. I also just purchased a 1TB WD drive. I don't really trust the Seagate any more and want to use the 1tb drive as a backup. I had backed up everything 6 months ago but it's amazing how much stuff you accumulate in 6 months time.
I am not too knowledgable in hardrives. Not enough to do anything complicated. Right now i am running Vista Ultimate 64 on the Seagate. Could i put another copy of Vista on the 1tb drive and just copy what i want over to it? That way if the Seagate dies again i can go right to the other drive. This will not be an external drive, just another bare drive in the bay. I realize i'm not going about it the best or most efficient way. Some people have explained better ways but most of it was over my head. I just want to be able to unplug the bad drive (if it goes bad) and continue with the other drive. So, would i run into any problems with Vista (not dual boot of course)on both my drives? Does it sound like this approach would work?
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May 27, 2008
Is it possible to copy my entire hard drive onto an external hard drive. Vista Premium, all the data, etc. and what would be a good software to accomplish this?
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Sep 27, 2008
I have an external hard drive, I reformated it so I could use Vista's backup.Now it seems that when my brother inlaw tries to put some music files(Itunes) that the hard disc is unavailable to his computer. At this stage it seems that Vista has conned me into destroying a perfectly good WD harddrive!I have created a second partion on the hard drive and I am reformatting that, as I write this, but the only formatting option seems to be this NTFS, and that is what I had already formatted the ExtHD to so I think this formatting will be to no avail!From what I can figure I need to format into FAT but I tried a quick format an ex-fat option was there, but the problem was the same. I am becoming more frustrated with Vista, seems I just keep running into things that should be simple and aren't!
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Mar 23, 2008
when booting up from a vista cd I accidentally had my usb external hard drive plugged in and the drive has been emptied and replaced by windows there are sintimental photos etc on the drive can anyone help me to restore them
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Jul 2, 2008
Does 'Local Disc' D mean it is a drive inside my machine or could it be my external hard drive?
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Oct 6, 2009
I was starting my computer today (that has Vista), and during the start up process, a black screen came up stating that there was an error opening up my external hard drive and it was checking for errors. After it finally booted up, I went to open the hard drive files, and it was totally BLANK! I then restarted the computer, and still the hard drive is EMPTY! I had ALL my important files in there!
The ONLY thing that looks promising is that when I go to Start then to Computer, it shows the hard drive there, and it still shows that 43GB are free of 111GB of storage (same info shows by right clicking on it and going to Properties). Why would it show this if nothing is on the hard drive anymore? Is there ANYWAY to recover these files again you think???? I NEED those files!!!! Remember that the hard drive STILL PHYSICALLY WORKS. It's just that I cannot access the files on my pc at the time for some reason.......
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May 21, 2008
I just bought and installed a external hard drive. I am fairly knowlegable about computers but this is my first Ex. Hard drive and know very little about there use. So what I want to know is how to save my Family Tree Makers files to it. And once I do that how do I know for sure it is opening from my new drive and not my computer C: drive? I saved it to a DVD one time but when the time came when I needed it all that was there was a short cut but no files.
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Mar 23, 2008
I recently bought a western digital 1TB hard drive which I had to reformat before I could use. Everything works good now, except for onething. Sometimes the computer doesn't want to restart while the new drive is plugged in. If I remove it from the USB port prior to restarting, it will restart just fine.
It shuts down and turns on without an issue. This only happens when I
restart the system with it plugged in.
So while it's not a big issue,it is an annoyance.
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Dec 8, 2008
I just Bought a 120Gig External HardDrive and i want to put An O/S on it how do i do that? i bought an external HDD because all my PC games take up all my HDD space in my computer :P)
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May 9, 2009
I got a large external hard drive today and it's instructions say to go to
disk management and do format and partition. I messed up and deleted the
drives volume. Now it is not listed in disk management. I looked everywhere
to get it back and can't figure it out. How do I make Vista recognize this
drive again so I can partition and format it?
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Jul 29, 2009
I am in need of assistance concerning my external hard drive. My hard drive has been working flawlessly for the past 3 years. As of today, my computer no longer recognizes it. This is what I have done so far:
-Unplugged it, plugged it back up, and my computer made a chime saying that it was recognized and said that it was ready to go.
-However, the HDD does not show up on the my computer tab.
-I removed the HDD from its enclosure, purchased a USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE and tried uploading the HDD to my wife's computer. Once again, her computer chimed saying that it was recognized (she runs XP, i have vista), but, once again, the hard drive was not in the my computer folder.
-I then proceeded to Computer Management, Disk Management, and noticed that my external hard drive is not there either.
I thought that maybe intially my power cord to the outlet in the wall just went bad, but after I bought the USB to SATA/IDE adapter and it still didn't work...well, I ran out of options.
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Nov 18, 2009
I have a simpletech external hard drive. When plugging it into the USB port windows vista is not recognizing the disk in my computer.
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Mar 26, 2008
I have built a new system to game with and have 2 new hard drives, on one I put XP Pro and then on the other I loaded Vista. I have more or less completed all the driver upgrades and windows updates but I keep getting repeated boot failures of Vista. I can always get into Safe mode but in Normal mode the boot fails just after the first spash screen at the point when the screen goes blank to be replaced by the small circular
Vista logo. After 2 or 3 attempts it succeeds to load but then the problem seems to reoccur, particularly when I have been back to XP for a while. I had a similar problem with XP but that seems to have sorted itself out. I have tired looking in the logs for faults and failures but no clues there.
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Oct 23, 2009
I had to create a windows recovery disk
I used it to system restore her system to a date before she had set her password
and on the menu it said install vista
and on my old laptop that my dad has it's a 2gb compaq presario
they're not made anymore
it has low memory it's very slow and really
hardly useable without getting very stressed
so if I used the recovery disk I created
and click install vista
will it be like a new laptop?
there's nothing needed on the laptop
so nothing is being lost by resetting the laptop
it's got vista home premium x86
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Mar 3, 2009
I recently had a laptop not recognize its own operating system. I figured if I were able to load Windows Vista on to an external hard drive and boot the computer from that external hard drive I should be able to recover some files and major downloads before I reformat the computer. However, Vista instillation will not install through USB2.0. Is there any way to install Vista onto an external hard drive? How and what do I do to get it done?
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Feb 6, 2009
I run Vista Home Premium on a self build computer with an Asus P5B Delux motherboard. It has an e SATA socket and I recently bought a Caddy for an External Drive to use as a back up with Windows Live OneCare. The drive is a 320G Seagate SATA2 ST3320620AS identical to the internal drive in my computer and the Caddy has eSATA and USB2 sockets. Everthing works fine if I connect via USB2 but the external drive is not recognised when I connect with eSATA. It may not make a lot of difference in practice but I would still like to be able to use eSATA. Does anyone know why the e Sata drive isn't recognised? Is this a Vista problem or perhaps there is a setting that needs adjusting?
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Jul 19, 2008
I would like some advice on which external hard drive to buy for Vista Ultimate x64. I am not a techy and have read some posts which have left me more than a bit confused! The external hard drive needs to be easy to set up and use. I just want to be able to (very) easily back up my files on a daily basis and save photos, spreadsheets to the external hard drive.
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Apr 5, 2009
I am trying to enable sharing on an external hard drive. I have sharing and permissions enabled. When I try to access the drive from another computer, I get the following error
message:
(name of drive) is not accessible. You might not have permission to use this network resource. Contact the administrator of this server to find out if you have access permission.
The drive is physically connected to a Vista machine and I want to be able to access it from an XP machine.
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Mar 15, 2009
I have a Seagate Free Agent Desk ITB and there is some issue with it on my new dell, anyone have any suggestions. A search of the web found numerous similiar issues. I need an external storage solution of 1 to 2 TB with 2 drives.
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Mar 23, 2008
I'm just about at wits end here. I've got an external HDD (Cavalry 2 X 500 GB = 1TB) that I usually plug in via e-SATA. It is currently setup in a SAFE33 configuration. It was working great on my old XP machine, and when I changed that machine to Vista Business (same everything, just plugged in a different boot disk and unplugged the old one) it continued to work great.
Then I did the following two things:
1) Tinkered with some permissions to allow only administrators access to some backups on the eHDD.
2) Went back to my old boot disk and tried to find the drive in XP.
When I did this the drive was not visible at all in XP. Now it is not visible in Vista either (not under Computer, Disk Management, or even BIOS). It is also not visible on my laptop (it had been previously). I have tried both e-SATA and USB connectors in multiple ports.
When I turn the drive on while either OS is running the machine freezes about 1 out of 5 times. Other times the eHDD turns on and I hear the disks spin up to speed, but the drive access LEDs never come on.
Don't know if this is related or not but I am also unable to load XP now, it stops on a driver called SPTD.sys.
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Jul 29, 2009
i've had the Western Digital WDH1U10000N 1TB for a little over a week now. it was working fine, up until yesterday night. i made the switch from my PC to my laptop. when i plugged the USB into my laptop, the
external hard drive was not recognized. so, i tried plugging the USB into another port, and after a few minutes it was recognized by the laptop. this morning when i plugged the external hard drive back to my
PC, it is not recognized. moreover i can't find it anywhere on the computer. i know for a fact it is turned on, but i just can't find it anywhere on my computer. does anyone know what the problem is?
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Jun 18, 2009
I have an HP laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit and I have two external usb hard drives; one to store everything (my files, videos, etc.) and I use the other one for virtual machines (although virtual machines are a bit slower because of the usb speed, but I'm really worried not to harm my laptop's hard disk)
1. The question I had is that: should I connect these hard drives all the time or I can unplug them if I do not intend to use them, especially the one used for virtual machines because it is used occasionally?
2. And another concern that I have is that when I have both hard drives connected and I start my computer up, it takes much longer time for my system to boot up and sometimes even my computer hangs when starting up when both hard drives are connected...........
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Jan 10, 2010
I have a 500GB MY BOOK external hard drive that I use for my monthly backup. I did a right click/properties/general and saw My Book is almost used up. Do I format the external drive and start another back up series? Is there a way I can back up over the previous data? As you can tell I am new to external hard drives....
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Oct 22, 2008
I have a Maxtor basics 1.5TB external hard drive that's running fine on my vista home premium computer but as soon as I reboot or boot the computer vista says "you need to format the disk in drive". If I unplug the hard drive from the mains and plug it back in everything goes back to working perfectly. My question is can I make vista detect it correctly in the first place without me having to reboot the hard drive?
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Apr 23, 2010
im using windows vista. i just recently bought a 500gb western digital external hard drive. i would like to know, how can i install an operating system on the external hard drive and keep the one that's currently on my pc, i would like to use the external hard drive to keep different documents, games, applications and files on, and to randomly boot of. (so its like their are two computers.) also will booting of another external hard drive have any affect on my computer or current files or hard drive.
one last thing, could i use the external hard drive to store flies on like i normally would. so what im asking there is that, do you have to use the whole external hard drive as an operating system, or could you sort of partition the external hard drive, so you could boot of it, but also connect it to a computer and use it like a normal usb when your not booted of it. sorry if this sound confusing i know a bit about computers but not too much.
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