Booting from a USB HDD

[oedipus_complex]

Does anyone know if you can boot an emachines 6805/7 from an external usb hdd?

[Matt Whritenour]

i dont think it's possible, but we should probably get another opinion

[oedipus_complex]

I hope it is as it would certainly solve the multiple OS issue for me

[jazzmandan]

I would strongly "guess" that you will not be able to "boot" from a USB device. The boot sequence is setup in the BIOS (F2 when you machine is starting). However, since the USB is not directly connected to IDE channel on the board it will not appear as a boot sequence option. The USB requires drivers to be loaded during the boot in order to work and therefore it cannot be the boot source.


dan

[CozmoXP]

Right now you can NOT boot Windows from a USB hard drive. If your BIOS does happen to support booting from USB disks, windows still does not. You can start an installation that way, and even think it is going to work, but when Windows XP starts to boot you'll get a bluescreen (7b, inaccessible boot device).

I'm not exactly sure why you'd really want to anyway, since USB disks are much slower than IDE.

[oedipus_complex]

I'm not exactly sure why you'd really want to anyway, since USB disks are much slower than IDE

So I can have multiple OS's. I don't want to clog up my audio drive with internet and games and what not

[CozmoXP]

Why not just get another disk to record to? You can have multiple versions of Windows on the same disk.. but I'm not sure what you're trying to dual boot. I don't see any point of dual booting these days. :shrug:

[Booyah]

Heres the bootable USB devices in a A7N8X bios > advanced section > first/second/3rd boot device...

USB-FDD
USB-CDROM
USB-ZIP
USB-HDD

You should see something similar unless they hid the options from you, many OEM's like to make their own custom bioses.

[K.B.]

Here's a rather old description of my multi-boot system. I wouldn't use FDisk any more, but do all that from within XP - I wasn't confident enough in XP back then.

And some XP tuning tips -
go to here (but don't do 11 or 26) or take a look at this thread.

One big advantage of multi-booting now is that you can install SP2 on your internet option, but leave your PT option(s) alone until any bugs are ironed out.

All this stuff here is copy n paste from Clip Cache (if you install multi-boot and clip cache make the CC reference file the same for all the boot options - that way anything you ever copy in one option is available to paste in all the others)