The enchanted broomstick Posted August 14, 2005 Report Share Posted August 14, 2005 So i have a laptop which i (up)downgraded from ME because its so unstable to windows 98 for performance rather than functions. I now have an external hard drive with loooooads of free space on it and i was wondering can i install XP to the external hard drive and boot it up as a secondary IDE so i can use it for other purposes? stu :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tomm Posted August 14, 2005 Report Share Posted August 14, 2005 I think you might be able to, but it would depend on your motherboard. A lot of modern motherboards allow you to boot from USB (Assuming the external hard drive is USB), it's a setting in the BIOS. So you could do that, but it would be very slow loading through a USB port or even firewire etc. A better option would be to install both onto the same (internal) hard drive and dual boot them. But why don't you just use WindowsXP? It's basically a lot more stable than ME... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cookie456_the2nd Posted August 14, 2005 Report Share Posted August 14, 2005 You should be able to, my laptop lets me if i want. it will be slow booting and performing though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The enchanted broomstick Posted August 14, 2005 Author Report Share Posted August 14, 2005 the hard drive on my laptop is only 6gb and i want to keep it as free as possible for the fastest performance i can possibly get out of it. If XP is going to be a slow booter its probably not worth the hassle. I thought it could of been a simple jobby with no after effects but no its not so dont really matter. cheers for the help though, stu :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Motivator Posted August 14, 2005 Report Share Posted August 14, 2005 This is what I was thinking of doing with my laptop. Was hoping that I could convert my current 19gig HD in the laptop all to RAM and then run everything off the External. Dunno if it would work though :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tomm Posted August 14, 2005 Report Share Posted August 14, 2005 No it won't. You can't just "convert" hard disk drive space to RAM. It's a completely different thing, physically. RAM is really fast and hard drives are comparatively very slow. Windows uses a bit of hard drive space for "virtual memory", but it's nowhere near as fast as RAM. Having any more than you probably do at the moment would probably be pointless. And then using the external hard drive would slow things down so much anyway it would be slow even if you did have 19GB of RAM :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simon Posted August 14, 2005 Report Share Posted August 14, 2005 the hard drive on my laptop is only 6gb and i want to keep it as free as possible for the fastest performance i can possibly get out of it. If XP is going to be a slow booter its probably not worth the hassle. I thought it could of been a simple jobby with no after effects but no its not so dont really matter. cheers for the help though, stu :shifty: ← Think of it this way, a basic hard drive reads stuff at like 7200mb a second. USB 2 reads at 100/200mb a second, and firewire does 400mb a second. The actual speeds might be way off, but its about the performance decrease you would see if you did try it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tomm Posted August 14, 2005 Report Share Posted August 14, 2005 Think of it this way, a basic hard drive reads stuff at like 7200mb a second. You're thinking of RPM. A 7200rpm drive can do up to 133 Megabytes/sec on an IDE channel. I know USB 2.0 is claimed to be loads, but it's actually only about 10megabytes per second, and that's for a large file which will go faster than a small one. So yeah, don't boot off your external hard drives, kids. It's stupid. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Simon Posted August 14, 2005 Report Share Posted August 14, 2005 You're thinking of RPM. A 7200rpm drive can do up to 133 Megabytes/sec on an IDE channel. I know USB 2.0 is claimed to be loads, but it's actually only about 10megabytes per second, and that's for a large file which will go faster than a small one. So yeah, don't boot off your external hard drives, kids. It's stupid. ← Oh, so my whole post is in actual fact a load of bollocks. My bad haha. :shifty: :"> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quick_spider Posted August 15, 2005 Report Share Posted August 15, 2005 If it's an old laptop then it wont have USB 2 which means external harddrives will be painfully slow. Jon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The enchanted broomstick Posted August 15, 2005 Author Report Share Posted August 15, 2005 The laptop is only about 18 months old and has USB2.0 and is now operating really fast just like turning a cd player on and off (which is exactly what i wanted) my hard drive manufacturer says that the data can be transfered at 480mb/s i dunno to be honest it all works fine how it is, just would of been a nice little thing if XP could be easily installed on the External HDD but it would seem its definately not. TOMM Get Inventing ! :lol: im sure you can do it. cheers, stu :shifty: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tomturd Posted August 15, 2005 Report Share Posted August 15, 2005 can i install XP to the external hard drive and boot it up as a secondary IDE so i can use it for other purposes? stu :shifty: ← Yeah. And I wouldnt worry about speed issues too much, once windows has booted (been copied to your RAM - will take a bit longer to boot from USB) then it should be as (just about as*) fast as if you booted from an IDE drive. Personally id wipe the 6gb drive, install XP on there, and for everything else use the USB. * cant be arsed to explain why, but I know someone will pick up on it unless I mention it... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tomm Posted August 15, 2005 Report Share Posted August 15, 2005 And I wouldnt worry about speed issues too much, once windows has booted (been copied to your RAM - will take a bit longer to boot from USB) then it should be as (just about as*) fast as if you booted from an IDE drive. ← Yeah, I guess, although that's assuming you've got enough RAM to cover everything. Knoppix takes ages to load (off a CD), but when it's loaded it works fine, plenty fast enough. And it might not be loads slower running off the external, but it would definitely be faster doing it the normal way, so that's what you should do (Like Tom said). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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