How can i put Windows Xp professional SP3 on a External Harddrive and boot off of that? its 500GB?

Question

i want to keep my vista but put xp on a ex. usb harddrive

Answer 1

Doing that is not the hard part.

What is most important is, can you actually boot from a usb port on that piticular computer?

Surprisingly, many cannot. But most new ones I've seen do.

Answer 2

its a complicated process and, your computer has to support booting from a USB device, I also wouldn't recommend it due to speed restrictions of USB compared to an internal hard drive it will run slow and possibly cause problems.

Answer 3

The only thing i can think right know it is to run XP from Vista and there tell it to install to that drive, but i think it will no work, because they want to be internal drive, to have control + if this go trough your external drive became a prisioner of the PC, and if you take anywhere else it will not recognized, because external drives are intended for backups and transport, but linux can do it, but it will be the same thing, no more transport.

But if you are curios and want to experiment, any device can be made bootable, if you instaled there the floppy boot disk of that operator, then created folders of the content you whant in there.