Using an external USB HDD as primary boot disk

[Goi]

Hi,
I have a HDD in an external USB2.0 enclosure that I wish to use as the primary boot drive sometimes. I've set my BIOS to boot off the USB HDD, and it detects the HDD correctly and my Windows XP CD is able to initialize installation on the drive(partition/format/copy setup files), but after the first reboot when the Windows logo shows up, I get a BSOD. I tried the entire installation procedure again from the beginning with the same result.

Are there any specific steps to take to install Windows on a USB drive and boot off it as the primary drive? Any drivers that I have to install first? According to this microsoft page, Windows doesn't officially support booting off a USB drive as the primary drive.

Q: Can a USB storage device be the primary (and only) means of storage?
No. USB-based mass storage devices cannot be the primary hard disk storage solution on a regular system (Microsoft Windows Logo Program System and Device Requirements, B10.1.5.6). However, these devices might be expected to be a replacement for booting to load an operating system (for example using a CD-ROM drive over USB) on the primary boot drive or as a replacement for legacy floppy disk drives. Booting from an external USB CD-ROM or USB floppy disk drive requires BIOS support.

Is this the final word though? I've been able to boot with my flash drive, but it's just a DOS boot disk for flashing firmware etc. I've never tried installing the entire Windows OS on it.

Anyway, the USB-IDE bridge is a Cypress chip if that matters.

Thanks in advance!

 

[drag]

I boot off of a USB flash drive for my file server, using the USB-HDD features of the bios. Full read/write and everything. No 'live cd' style boot.

(the actual files and such are on
RAID5, but it does boot and run the OS off the flash and would work fine irregardless of wiether or not the harddrives were present)

Apparently this is a Windows limitation and not a hardware one.

 

[Looney]

Originally posted by: drag
I boot off of a USB flash drive for my file server, using the USB-HDD features of the bios. Full read/write and everything. No 'live cd' style boot.

Doesn't a USB flash drive have a finite amount of read/writes? Like 10000 or something like that?

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Looney

Originally posted by: drag
I boot off of a USB flash drive for my file server, using the USB-HDD features of the bios. Full read/write and everything. No 'live cd' style boot.

Doesn't a USB flash drive have a finite amount of read/writes? Like 10000 or something like that?

Ya sure. I'm sure I'll reach the limit of that in about 4 years or so. It's more like a 100,000 or so, so you do the math. It realy depends on the device. I think

The actual read/writes happen on the harddrive or in ramdisks. Only time the drive gets written on is with configuration changes and system updates.

 

[Goi]

I'm not sure if UFD controllers have the same wear leveling algorithms as SSD controllers. SSDs are touted to last a lot longer than conventional magnetic HDDs despite the wear of NAND flash due to wear leveling algorithms. Personally I don't think it'll be a problem. Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what your setup looks like drag. I was asking about booting up with a USB hard drive as the primary, and possibly only drive, rather than a UFD, though their application could very possibly be identical since both are USB Mass Storage class devices.

 

[Smilin]

XP limitation as far as I know. Someone out there may have hacked something togther but nothing official that I'm aware of. Go Vista or Linux mebe?

The bsod you are getting is probably a 7B. Iirc the usb drivers get brought up later in the boot sequence so you get caught in a catch 22 trying to get the drivers to load the drivers.