The easy summary here is that booting from certain external devices, like floppy
diskettes, is usually supported by a modern motherboard BIOS. Booting from
others is, sort of. For these, you need to do the legwork of preparing the
bootable media to contain the drivers needed to accept a handoff of control from
the BIOS.
Personally, I suspect greater collusion among Dell, BIOS writers and good old
Microsoft! There is no logical reason why someone cannot boot from any device
connected to the system. Enter the Orwellian un-logic of the Microsoft borg.
You think Microsoft wants it easy for people to dual-boot a personal computer,
even with 2 versions of Windows? Do a Google search on the keyword BartPE to
find out all the grunt work one needs to do just to BUILD a bootable CD, all
because the CD boot process is inordinately complicated in the Microsoft world.
You can also find out there how to make a bootable flash stick, something very
similar to a bootable external hard drive.
Copying a CD is child's play. Making a Windows install CD slipstreamed with
the latest hundreds of MB of Microsoft "critcal fix" band aids, bubble gum and
tissue paper is real work, justifiable only of one regularly installs Windows on
computers.
.... Ben Myers
On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:04:50 -0800, "Timothy Daniels"
<> wrote:
>Well, I figured it was one of those "unobtainium" things,
>but I thought I'd ask the experienced Dell experts. Some
>guy recently posted in microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
>that he can boot his HP laptop from a SATA drive connected
>via an eSATA ExpressCard, and he even gave the model
>nos. of the HP laptop and the Addonics ExpressCard. No
>one else has confirmed his experience, but I was hoping
>there might be a way to do it with a Dell laptop. As the
>Dell tech support rep said, he has noticed that several Dell
>BIOS features have gotten dropped through the years
>because there seemed to be no consumer interest in them.
>He said this in reference to my inquiry about there being
>fewer Dell desktops with the ability to assign boot priority
>among multiple hard drives, but he said that there were other
>dropped features as well. I guess I can't fault Dell for
>dropping un-noticed features, but I still find it annoying.
>
>*TimDaniels*
>
>"Ben Myers" wrote:
>> [......]
>> Whether it is a SIIG eSATA or a USB stick, the problem
>> of booting Windows or installing it lies in the drivers, namely
>> having the right ones on the boot media so that the boot
>> process recognizes the boot device hardware interface and
>> continues using it. In other words, you might end up building
>> a hard drive that will boot only from eSATA and not from in
>> the computer itself.
>>
>> So Dell's tech support is not shucking and jiving you. When
>> they say no, it means darn difficult. Neither SIIG not Dell have
>> the technical expertise nor the motivation to solve the proble...
>>
>> Ben Myers
>>
>> "Timothy Daniels" wrote:
>>
>>>Has anyone here been able to boot a Dell laptop using
>>>an eSATA ExpressCard adapter with an external SATA
>>>hard drive? Dell's tech support says no, at least not for
>>>the XPS line of laptops, and SIIG says that their eSATA
>>>ExpressCard adapter can't enable booting from an external
>>>SATA hard drive. That leaves all of Dell's other laptops
>>>and other maker's eSATA ExpressCards to wonder about.
>>>Is there any further information on this? The goal is to boot
>>>various OSes from external SATA hard drives.
>>>
>>>*TimDaniels*
>>>
>
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