OT: External Disk Drive / Primer / Boot to OS on External?

Office Max has Seagate External 250G USB 2.0 hard drives for $89. That
price can't be beat. It is the better Seagate drive -- stackable one.
If you've seen them you know what I mean. They stay cool, and seem to
be very reliable.

To those "newerbies" who don't know how to hook up and prepare a USB
2.0 external, I'll write the steps. I know how things can be
intimidating until actually doing it. I'm sure some of the
experienced members are laughing right now :-)

- Buy the drive lol

- Hook it up to your computer, and your computer will recognize it.

OK here's the point

- Once the computer recognizes the drive, it's usable. The problem
is that it is FAT32. You don't want that if you're running XP or
Vista or Windows 2000 (not sure about 98 or 95). You want NTFS.

- To change it to NTFS, right click the My Computer icon on your
desktop, and choose Manage. From there choose Disk Management. Find
the new drive, right click, and delete partition. MAKE SURE YOU HAVE
THE RIGHT DRIVE, all the data on that drive is erased. Then right
click on the drive and there should be an option to make a new
partition. Follow the prompts and accept alll the defaults. I
recommend not doing a "Quick Format". I have no idea what disc
compression does but I recommend not clicking it. Just use the
defaults.

- Your drive will then go thru the process of formatting which can
take a while. You can see the progress under the Status column.

That's it! You now have a NTFS-formatted hard drive that is just
another letter in Windows Explorer.

By the way, you can also change drive letters in Disk Management. To
change the name of a drive you can do that anytime in Windows Explorer
by right clicking properties of the drive and changing the name field.

<end of primer>

Now, I am going to see if I can change the boot order so that an
external drive can boot and if I can install Vista on it without it
being a dual boot scenario (to boot to the different OS I'd just
change the boot order in the bios each time).

Also, I am going to try to do that with Linux. All this talk about
open source leads me to want to learn more about that.

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:02:49 -0500, Journey <> wrote:

>Now, I am going to see if I can change the boot order so that an
>external drive can boot and if I can install Vista on it without it
>being a dual boot scenario (to boot to the different OS I'd just
>change the boot order in the bios each time).
>
>Also, I am going to try to do that with Linux. All this talk about
>open source leads me to want to learn more about that.

Note: For Vista I'd use my firewire Seagate External. I don't even
know if it's possible to boot from an external; I would think it is.
It may be as slow as molasses in January however.

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:06:01 -0500, Journey <> wrote:

>On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:02:49 -0500, Journey <> wrote:
>
>>Now, I am going to see if I can change the boot order so that an
>>external drive can boot and if I can install Vista on it without it
>>being a dual boot scenario (to boot to the different OS I'd just
>>change the boot order in the bios each time).
>>
>>Also, I am going to try to do that with Linux. All this talk about
>>open source leads me to want to learn more about that.
>
>Note: For Vista I'd use my firewire Seagate External. I don't even
>know if it's possible to boot from an external; I would think it is.
>It may be as slow as molasses in January however.


Good question. I think the answer should lie in your bios. If it
recognizes a usb perpheral, I'd think you should be good to go. If it
doesn't, I don't know without researching this further, how you could
get around it. A quick thought to me is to research if a pci/usb card
would get around it? Bottom line is that I'm not certain here.

Regardless Journey, you are getting to be quite an inspiration in your
posts here because I'm finding your posts either very informative or
worthy questions. Could it be because you can't get out due to too
much snow <g> ? Anyway keep it up!

<RnR> wrote in message news:...
> On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:06:01 -0500, Journey <> wrote:
>
>>On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 01:02:49 -0500, Journey <> wrote:
>>
>>>Now, I am going to see if I can change the boot order so that an
>>>external drive can boot and if I can install Vista on it without it
>>>being a dual boot scenario (to boot to the different OS I'd just
>>>change the boot order in the bios each time).
>>>
>>>Also, I am going to try to do that with Linux. All this talk about
>>>open source leads me to want to learn more about that.
>>
>>Note: For Vista I'd use my firewire Seagate External. I don't even
>>know if it's possible to boot from an external; I would think it is.
>>It may be as slow as molasses in January however.
>
>
> Good question. I think the answer should lie in your bios. If it
> recognizes a usb perpheral, I'd think you should be good to go. If it
> doesn't, I don't know without researching this further, how you could
> get around it. A quick thought to me is to research if a pci/usb card
> would get around it? Bottom line is that I'm not certain here.
>
> Regardless Journey, you are getting to be quite an inspiration in your
> posts here because I'm finding your posts either very informative or
> worthy questions. Could it be because you can't get out due to too
> much snow <g> ? Anyway keep it up!


Vista will not boot from an external drive. It was a big controversy during
beta testing.

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:20:39 -0400, "Tom Scales" <>
wrote:

>Vista will not boot from an external drive. It was a big controversy during
>beta testing.

Thanks for the info. Tom. I can see how this would be controversial.

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:35:48 -0500, RnR wrote:

>Regardless Journey, you are getting to be quite an inspiration in your
>posts here

Hi RnR, thank you for the comment, but I'm a little uneasy because
there are so many people here who are informative.

I'm not really an inspiration -- more like a work in progress :-) The
reason I write a post like this is to try to give back because I
receive a lot from this group too and I want to try to keep it
balanced.

I'd love to exchange e-mails if you are interested. My address is
.

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:07:30 -0500, Journey <> wrote:

>
>I'd love to exchange e-mails if you are interested. My address is

Oh shoot... I forgot to type my e-mal a different way. Now I am going
to get a lot of junk mail probably!

On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 11:07:30 -0500, Journey <> wrote:

>On Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:35:48 -0500, RnR wrote:
>
>>Regardless Journey, you are getting to be quite an inspiration in your
>>posts here
>
>Hi RnR, thank you for the comment, but I'm a little uneasy because
>there are so many people here who are informative.
>
>I'm not really an inspiration -- more like a work in progress :-) The
>reason I write a post like this is to try to give back because I
>receive a lot from this group too and I want to try to keep it
>balanced.
>
>I'd love to exchange e-mails if you are interested. My address is
>.


Ok. I'll email you later in the week. You'll know it's me as the
email address will begin with rnr . I don't want to give out my
email address here because of spam and I share email with another
(pay email service). Actually I almost never get spam there but I
don't want to push my luck <g>.