How to install Windows 7 on a portable hard drive

Antman said:

Chuckle. I so want to learn this. Latest obstacle...

Yeah,
I noticed that prior to my actual posting... 503

First thought was: M$ bought him out !

Second thought: Maybe it actually is down for maint...
Third thought: Yeah, "Temporarily", for how long ?
Last thought: What the hell, posting is the best -I- could do...

Here's a blurb, from when it was still alive:

Installing and booting Windows XP from USB drive -- Guide
(last updated: 11.06.2006 12:23:26 ) created by emanuel
( on 03.03.2006 14:08:51 )

What is this about?

To keep the introduction short, Microsoft denies that booting Windows off a USB drive works.

See this page:
Vista Forums
for example. It says:

*Q: Can a USB storage device be the primary (and only) means of storage?*
No. USB-based mass storage devices cannot be the primary hard
disk storage solution on a regular system ...

Or this one:
Booting / Installing windows XP from USB drive - microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics | Google Groups
from the microsoft newsgroups:

Windows cannot boot from an USB drive. If your computer supports
booting from such device, you can load a boot loader to the USB
device which starts Windows XP from the HDD.

Anyway, the web is full of those. I was wondering about the same
thing, as i did not want to put a Windows partition on my
Linux.based work laptop, and thought it was a good idea to run
Windows XP off a USB Hard drive that i just plug in when i need it,
and boot from it. To put a long story short, this is exactly what i
do now, thanks to the fantastic research of the people credited
below. However, it took me significant time to figure out all the
painful little problems, and i was not fully happy with the current
official guide <http://www.winusb.de> by Dietmar (no pun, he was the
first to make ANYthing public). I wanted an easy guide that allows
creating a modified version of the Windows XP CD, for painless and
transparent installation to as many systems as you want.

This page is the result of my work. Have fun!

*Credits*

...must go to the people that made this guide possible in the first
place. In recent months, a few blokes going by the handles of
*mkiaer*, *Dietmar *and *sisal *and a few others from the 911.net
forums <http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=14181> came
up with many good pieces of research on how to enable any NT-based
Windows to boot from a USB-drive. Little of this guide would exist
without them - in fact the only reason why i write this up is that
my particular solution seems to be lower effort than any of the
steps i saw before. Many of the steps here are the result of their
research.

AAIRON said:

on an obscure forum at that,

Well thanks for stopping by. Please don't hesitate in not returning to obscurity