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Bootable External HDD?

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Can you buy a Bootable External HDD?
I am looking to get an Bootable External HDD, basically to create a raid type back up. That way if my internals fail I get still boot from my external.

Topic

SATA

In reply to Bootable External HDD?

With SATA, you can have an external HDD that could also be bootable. I am sure that it is also possible to boot from a USB 2.0 drive, but I have never tried it.

I have EIDE drives

In reply to SATA

I have 2 EIDE drives now, and Im am looking to make sure I can still get to the info if the fail by setting up a ghost image on an external.
I dont have a raid controller, which wold be more ideal. Non the less is this feat possible?

Booting from external hard disk

In reply to I have EIDE drives

As far as I’m aware it should be possible to boot from an external hard disk (USB or Firewire) as long as the device itself can be seen in the BIOS as a bootable device (like a Floppy, CD-ROM or DVD drive)

On home PC the BIOS allows booting off of my USB pen drive or my USB2 external Hard drive as they’re both visible devices during the POST.

If your device is not visible to the machine until Windows has loaded, i.e. it’s dependant upon some driver or your PC’s BIOS doesn’t see the attached device you won’t be able to boot from it.

Depends on OS

In reply to Booting from external hard disk

I have a memory stick and an external USB hard drive. After looking into it a while ago, it appears it is fine to boot in terms of hardware, but MS Windows doesn’t support booting to USB storage devices. This is mentioned on Microsofts website in the technical section. It is possible to boot on Linux I do believe, will be trying that later this year once the workload has subsided.

Is Possible bys USB or FireWire

In reply to Bootable External HDD?

If your BIOS support “USB legacy devices” you can do it. It’s possible with USB 1.1 and 2.0 compliant devices.

Access to your BIOS and go to boot devices section. Change the boot order preferently that your hard disk would be ignored at boot time. If appears “try another devices” enabled it. Here is the trick.

When your PC will boot, first would try with a Floppy disk, then a CD-ROM and if can’t found a hard disk or if you specified another devices (like USB, Firewire or network), then this will be the next device to try the booting process.

And here comes the external device booting. Obviusly, you had to be formatted that device preferently as FAT32 and with system files installed (DR-DOS, Caldera, MS-DOS or Windows 95/98).

Another options will be boot with a CD that emulates a Windows OS installed. You can search in google for BART preinstalled….
***********************************
Bart’s Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD… Bart’s PE Builder helps you build a “BartPE” (Bart Preinstalled … Hi, my
name is Bart Lagerweij. I’ve been creating DOS based boot disks and bootable …
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ – 63k – 12 Apr 2005 –
***********************************

This tool can put your current Windows version installed including Office into a CD and made bootable too. In theory… I didn’t tried yet.

There is another tool taht permits format and/or partitioning a hard disk; access to certain functions of Windows from a bootable CD. I don’t remember their name.

Regards

Javier Toledo
gjtp69@hotmail.com

[Author]

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