Just like the title says.. can I dual boot using an ext. Hard drive. I found an old 250gb phanton hd I've never used. Figured I could throw it in there. Would vista dual boot to that. Or no??
Let me rephrase this.. can I dual boot with a External Hard Drive that uses USB..
I know as long as the PC see's the HD. I can Dual Boot. But I meant to ask if it was ok if that HD uses USB for the connection, or is USB not fast enough, compared to say SATA with an internal.
Is it possible? It would be to a strictly custom install since the Windows installer especially for 7 will prompt you with a message stating Windows cannot be installed on usb drives like external hard drive of flash drives. Is it actually reliable?
Not really since any boot up with the drive itself plugged can see the boot configuration changed without warning if the drive letter is reassigned. With the ubunu installer being a different OS entirely you can see that distro for instance see a direct install from a live cd to an external HD or flash drive. The usb bus can also see lags at times depending if you like everyone has other devices lined up like keyboards, mice, other addon devices.
The eSata type connection on the other hand is an extension from the board to an external enclosure there still seeing the onboard controllers involved. When first signing up to for testing the 7 betas here I soon found myself running out of internal drive space already having a working dual boot across drives between XP and Vista.
The RCs will see the drive taken over along with the present Vista drive while Vista will end up on the former external drive. The other two are a matched pair by the same make but different model intended for internal use and can be made into an array at some point when eventually upgrading Vista to the finshed 7.
W7 Ultimate x64/W10 Pro x64/W11 Pro Triple Boot - Main PC W7 Remote PC Micro ATX W7 Pro x64/W11 Pro
CPU
AMD Phenom II X4 975 Deneb 3.6ghz - 965 2nd remote pc
Motherboard
Gigabyte GA-790XTA-UD4-Gigabyte GA-880GM-D2H remote pc
Memory
Kingston Hyper X DDR3 1600 1.5v 16gb - Hyper X Fury 8gb 2nd
Graphics Card(s)
MSI HD Radeon 5750 1gb - MSI HD Radeon 6450 on mini tower
Sound Card
Creative Labs X-Fi Xtreme Audio P - Realtek onooard 2nd case
Monitor(s) Displays
ASUS VW199T-P 19" HP 2082a Main-HP 2082a 20" remote pc
Screen Resolution
Asus 1440x900 - HP 1600x900
Hard Drives
WD Black 1TB HD per OS W7, W10, and pending W11 presently on 500gb OS Drive - Pending Triple 1TB HDs for Spanned Storage/backup volume
Single 2TB external USB enclosure, single 1TB System 7 Host/Boot drive, Pending 8TB external HD for system image b
PSU
Corsair 750TX - primary / Corsair CX600 - second
Case
Antec 900-2 - SSD compatible / NZXT Vulcan mini tower
