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Windows XP Home boot disk

topic posted Mon, December 26, 2005 - 10:43 PM by  AUi 		Share/Save/Bookmark
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Anyone know if you can have alternate boot disks, like Macs can have external Firewire disks as boot disks?

I notice that in XP you can partition a drive and have an alternate OS (like Windows 98) but I haven't found any reference to booting from an alternate drive (even an internal)

The ideal might be to have a SATA PCI card and use various external drives, such as for a mirror drive or to insulate the Internet drive from other programs. It would be nice to be able to unmount the internal drive and boot from an external.
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AUi
offline AUi
Hawaii
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  • Lee R.
    Lee R.
    offline 82

    Re: Windows XP Home boot disk

    Tue, December 27, 2005 - 2:22 PM
    Yes, you can boot from alternative drives, (network, USB) but it has to be set up in the bios to search for the other media first. Firewire may not work because I haven't seen a bios that recognises firewire yet.
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    • shatter
      shatter
      offline 0

      Re: Windows XP Home boot disk

      Wed, December 28, 2005 - 4:28 PM
      I think for Firewire you'd need to have an MS DOS boot disk with the firewire driver s(if they exist) on it.

      In theory it's possible and wouldn't need to have BIOS support. It would work very similar to GHOST disk booting to operate off the network without bios support. BIOS is only needed if you are tryingto boot from a bios boot without a bootdisk. however witha boot disk you should in theory be able to boot form any device as long as you have a driver disk.

      --S
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      • Roger
        Roger
        offline 14

        Re: Windows XP Home boot disk

        Tue, February 7, 2006 - 8:33 AM
        What???
        Can you translate without the double talk and cross talk.
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        • Sean
          Sean
          online 246

          Re: Windows XP Home boot disk

          Tue, February 7, 2006 - 1:46 PM
          You will need a Boot disk or device that has drivers for the Firewire on it because at this time no computers are known to have Firewire boot options available in the BIOS.

          If you dont have a floppy drive (which is more likely on new computers) you can get a USB floppy drive or install the Dos boot files onto a USB flash drive (as long as your computer supports booting from USB device).

          That all translated, No, you can not boot from the firewire device, you can "access" it with a boot floppy, but you wont be able to run Windows XP off it. You might be able to configure Linux to run off a firewire drive with a boot floppy or device that points to the Firewire, but you are still booting off of the floppy or USB key and not the actual Firewire device.
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