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#11
You can't boot from an external USB hard drive.
If your intent is to boot from the external drive and select an OS to install from a list, that is no easy feat to accomplish. I don't know of an easy way to do it. You would likely have to do it from the preinstallation environment.
Microsoft Windows PE
Are these copies of Windows copies of the install disks?
It is possible to boot from a USB external hard drive. It's not easy but its doable. "Windows To Go" for example. Microsoft doesn't want you to do it with Windows 7 but it has been done. How practical it is I don't know. I wouldn't think it would work very well, especially if you start plugging it into different hardware.
Thanks Kerry, I was going with what my board manual says about booting from USB, it doesn't support it. Never tried though.
I give you guys credit, I was lost on what he actually wants to do, that is
Last edited by AddRAM; 04 Apr 2013 at 17:11.
No problem. My two ASUS motherboards support it. My new ASUS laptop too. I do all my installs from USB thumb drives. It is so much faster than doing it from the DVD. I don't have an optical drive in either of my desktop PC's, I have just about everything I need on thumb drives or external USB hard drives. I have a USB DVD burner for burning disks and loading games that use DRM.
Gotcha, I can boot a thumb drive and install w7, done it a few times. Haven't tried booting an OS from USB though.
Hum the closest I got was to clone a HDD (hooked up with the gadget) from an external but you need the "middleman" HDD operating the machine to do the cloning.
Still think a straight stick install is best what hesam would like to do sounds like an awful lot of grief.