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External drive needing Windows Installed

C

Cage72

Junior Member
I have WD My Book external Harddrive that I'm needing to install windows onto as this will be the sole,primary drive that I will be using. This will be connected to and older tower desktop system. If I connect a usb 2.0 pci adapter to card to the mother board for the external drive will I be able to install a Windows OS on the external drive or would I have to go the route of buying a usb 2.0 to ide adpater cable instead. I have no other drive to use and this will be the primary drives that needs to be bootable . Thanks in Advance.
 
Whether you can use it as a boot drive depends on whether your motherboard is new enough that the BIOS can recognize and boot to an external USB device before it sees Windows.

Even if it can, I don't recommend doing this because data transfer from a USB hard drive will be much slower than a drive connected directly to and IDE (ATA) channel.

Large internal IDE drives are cheap. Why would you want to use an external drive?

If you want specific hardware recommendations, give us the make and model of your motherboard.
 
Why not make life easy? Open the WD box, remove the hard drive, and put it into the computer. You may need a PCI SATA card for the motherboard, since the disk in the WD housing is likely SATA.
 
There are no screws on the case not sure how to get it out without possibly breaking it. I purchased external because locally I could not find anywhere that had good size drives as this for this price. I was told by a few people that I sould be able to install windows and have this as my sole primary drive...and cant be returned.
 
I don't even know if a SATA-to-USB-to-IDE connection is even possible. At best, it's much more likely to cause problems than a direct connection.

If you search a bit, I'm sure you'll find a photo article on the web that will show you how to disassemble the WD case. I've pulled apart both Seagate and WD cases for clients who have had failed drives or failed USB controllers. Come to think of it, it's usually the USB controllers in the cases.

Commerically-built USB drives (like the WD or Seagate drives) are not known for their reliability. They tend to run hotter than internal hard drives (no fans and no space), their USB controllers are a failure point, and they tend to get jarred or dropped, leading to disk failure.

Disk warranties aren't terribly useful anyway. It costs way too much to ship the failed disk. And you get back a "refurbished disk", which I'm not sure if I'd trust, anyway. My last hard disk was purchased two weeks ago: $55 for a Terabyte disk. It's getting to the point where it's hardly worth bothering with the warranty.

My recommendation stands: Insert the disk into the computer case, hooking it up to a PCI or PCI-E SATA controller card. Those are as cheap as $10-$25 and they've worked fine for me on many computers.
 
Originally posted by: Cage72
Thanks to www.instructables.com I was able to dislodge the Drive from the enclosure.
Click to expand...
Those plastic WD and Seagate housings are a pain to work with. Glad you were able to get it apart. I think you'll be happier in the long run with an internal hard drive for your purpose, and you can always put it back into the housing if you want.

Edit:
Errr...I forgot to mention that to do a Windows XP install to a PCI or PCI-E SATA controller, you will almost assuredly need either a floppy drive or a slipstreamed XP Install CD with the SATA controller drivers inserted. If you are using Vista or W7, then you can use a USB Flash drive or CD drive to get the drivers to the OS.

I've never done it, but if you need to add the controller drivers to an XP install CD, that's supposed to be pretty easy with NLite.
 
Thanks RebateMonger I do really appreciate your time and help. I was kind of freaking out because I needed to have this up and running by monday for my online classes..still have to network my laptop and desktop mid-tower together.
 
I picked up a ide to sata adapter...installed the drive. Got windows XP Pro installed. Network card blinks as it should with the cat5 cable connected to the cable modem..but cant connect to the internet. Is it a driver issue?
 
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