OT - booting XP from USB

[David WE Roberts]

Possibly slightly on topic as I am looking for a DIY solution :-) As usual, posting here because of the wealth of IT knowledge.

Briefly, Windows XP has an historical flaw. Despite having the underlying capability to handle USB devices at boot time it doesn't configure the USB drivers fully until part way through the boot. This means that you can start booting from a USB HDD if your BIOS supports it but XP then does something to USB which means it won't read from a USB HDD during the critical parts of the boot sequence. Sadly, the drivers are all there, just not declared in the correct way and in the correct places of the configuration files and registry.

Google has found me far too much information but there are so many competing resources out there that it is proving very difficult to find a simple definitive solution. I have a long description about how to produce a modified XP installation disc which will populate the configuration files and registry during the first part of the install. I am now wondering this; as I have completed the first stage of the installation of XP which involves formatting the USB HDD to NTFS, copying the XP files across, and populating the registry hives could I modify the configuration files and registry entries on the HDD directly instead of having to go through a number of steps to unpack the ISO, modify the files, then rebuild a new ISO before creating a new CD?

So before I embark on a long and frustrating sequence of investigations I thought I would ask if anyone else on the NG had solved the problem, and if so which route they took.

To be absolutely clear, I want to install to and run XP from a 40Gb external USB HDD. I don't want to use the HDD to install on my internal drive (which at 4Gb SSD in an EEE PC 900 is too small to comfortably run XP). I have an external USB CD/DVD drive to use for my XP CD. I want to use XP because I have bought the OEM CD which proved to me that running XP from the SSD is too much like hard work.

Any advice and previous experience more than welcome.

Cheers

Dave R

[Another Dave]

AIUI, you can only boot via USB using a FAT32 file system, ie NOT ntfs.

I could be wrong and no doubt others will correct me.

Another Dave

[a i]

IIRC I used the method described here the one time I needed to do this:-

[John Williamson]

Not the way you say you want to do it, but I am running XP Home on an EEE PC701, with the 4Gb SSD.

The sneaky bit was installing 2 Gig of RAM, and using a 32Gig SDHC card for programs and data. I also formatted the SSD as NTFS and compressed the filesystem. There is no swap needed with this much RAM in spite of Windows' dire warnings, so I set the swap size to zero. I also remove the backup folders whenever Windows updates itself using a program called, rather boringly, Windows Update Remover. Disable your browser caching, too. The only gotchas are that system restore and hibernation aren't possible and things slow right down when the free space on C: drops below about 400Meg.

Another possibility with the EEE PC 701s is to replace the wifi card with a PCI Express SSD, and that will give you up to 64 Gig of space,and you can use a USB dongle for wifi. Some early ones actually have a spare PCI Express socket on the motherboard, and they all have the solder pads and space to fit one.

[Andy Burns]

I can't see any reason why it would matter, other than NTFS having a very high overhead on small sized drives.

[Another Dave]

What I mean is that all the BIOSs that I've come across can only boot from FAT file systems via USB.

Another Dave

[David WE Roberts]

IIRC I used the method described here the one time I needed to do this:-

AFAICT this uses BartPE which installs a radically cut down version of XP - designed for the times when the USB flash drives were very small. I would prefer a full install of XP with the USB issue resolved.

Thanks for the link, though.

[David WE Roberts]

With you until you mentioned a 64Gb SSD - being of poor and 'umble stock this is not financially attractive. Besides, I already have the USB HDD. I have programs and data moved over to the second 16Gb SSD - however this is reportedly too slow to run XP effectively if the OS is installed there. I also have the drive compressed and regularly clear out all but the latest restore point. It is the windows updates that are killing me, despite regular attempts to sweep up behind them. I could also get a fast SDHC card but the EEE PC 900 treats this as USB attached at which point my bucket springs a familiar hole.

I originally planned to nLite the XP install and reinstall on the 4Gb SSD but if I could just install on the 40Gb USB HDD it would make life so much easier. However, life was not meant to be easy.

Cheers

Dave R

[John Williamson]

It's not essential, and I don't use one.

There I can't help, as I've only got the 4GB SSD and a SDHC card slot. But I doubt the SSD is *that* much slower than a normal laptop HD. The gotcha seems to be that on the EEE, all the drives except the boot drive are USB mounts. My boot SSD has 3.21 GB used (compressed from 4.83 GB), and half a Gig of that is the antivirus database.

Windows Update Remover (Free, no nags) will remove 99% of the crud that Windows update leaves behind, at the cost of not being able to uninstall any updates.

you don't use it to remove the backup folders, it will also uninstall individual Windows updates if they're causing problems.

Whwether it's fast enough depends on what you want to do. My 701 is fast enough for browsing and office work, the main problem is the screen size, which is way too small at 800x480. If I can be bothered, it's also acceptable for a bit of photo editing or ripping the odd CD.

I use it as my day to day machine when I'm touring and haven't got enough power available to run the all-singing, all-dancing dual core Toshiba. Using the USB mounted DVD drive, it will even play DVD movies full screen using VLC. I have edited a short (30 second) video sequence on it, but that was more a proof that it could be done than a pleasurable experience.

True, and when you think you've got it cracked, they change the rules. I found that nLite didn't help that much, by the way. There is a limit below which XP becomes unusable, and you can already do that by using the install options on the XP CD.

Keep trying, and you'll find that the EEE PCs are more capable than they seem to most people.

Now, if anyone knows how to format a SDHC card using NTFS, then I could compress the drive and free enough space for a couple of movies. It might even let it run a bit faster, as the bottleneck is the USB interface.

[Stephen]

Not sure if this will solve your problem, but I have experience of a similar problem but involving linux.

Basically I had a Linux liveCD. it worked in all of my PCs except one.

It basically claimed it could not find a valid file system part way through the boot process.

I had a hunch at the time that when the PC was started, access to the CD drives was via the BIOS. So the LiveCD started up, but then switched to using drivers to access the CD drive. At this point it fell over.

I then used UNetBootIn to put the Live Linux ISO onto a removable external USB hard disc drive.

My PC would not support booting from a USB hard drive.

I did a spot of googling and came across PLOP boot manager.

You use IsoBuster to put the ISO file on a blank CD or use Raw Write to put the IMG file onto a floppy.

Both IsoBuster and Raw Write are free downloads. as well as PLOP boot manager.

Insert either the CD or the floppy, set the PC to boot off that and you get a menu of boot options. Select USB, it will the install a dev ice driver for USB devices.

The Live Linux then worked.from the removable USB hard drive..... In your case, you could use BartPE to put Windows on your hard drive and then use PLOP boot manager to then boot off that.

Hope that is helpful,

Stephen. .

[chris French]

In message , David WE Roberts writes

Not to denigrate the knowledge of the esteemed contributors to uk.d-i-y :-) but the denizens of uk.comp.homebuilt are often pretty good with these sorts of questions

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Either FAT32 or NTFS... To assure of the kosherness of the driver, go to this page first and follow the link/instructions to extract the genuine HP utility...

[AlanD]

Been there done that on a 901. The 16GB SSD is *far* slower than the 4GB one, and not worth using for boot. I agree that the updates are a PITA for filling up the disk. In the end I gave up with MicroShite, and put on EasyPeasy:

and more recently Ubuntu. EasyPeasy was good, and quick, but was intermittent with WPA networks. Ubuntu seems better in this respect, but version 11.04 is a bit slow. I may switch it to the 10.x release soon.

Linux + OpenOffice on an Eee is a fairly good combination for day-to-day use.

Alan.

[John Williamson]

I've got the proper program now, and will be checking it shortly.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

And if you bother reading the fecking instructions...

[David WE Roberts]

Thanks for confirming the slowness of the 16Gb SSD. I am as usual between a rock and a hard place.

16Gb too slow. 4Gb too small. External USB a PIA to set up. Unfortunately I need Windoze to run some specific utilities when I am travelling and not lugging my 15" portable.

Linux sems to run O.K. off the 16Gb drive - I have a tailored version of Ubuntu on there (can't remember where I got it) for EEE PCs and it is pretty good.

I think I will have to fight my way to an XP install on the USB HDD but over a longer time period.

[John Williamson]

It works, and claimed to format the card as NTFS, then when I started writing to it, it gave a delayed write failure error for both the file and the MFT after half a dozen Gigabytes.

Back to the drawing board. I may use something like Truecrypt to set up a compressed partition. Or I may need to get hold of a 64GB thumbdrive and solder an extra socket onto the motherboard.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Odd; I've been using it quite happily to format a couple of 16GB SDHC cards as NTFS and FAT32 alternately. Perhaps a compatibility problem, as raised its head recently with an SD/CF converter card - it wouldn't read in my Canon or PC card reader, but can be read fine in my old Fuji; which is ok, as I simply take the SD card out of it.