Boot from USB Drive

Question

After spending the last several days searching these forums, a couple of on-line chats with Dell tech support, some of my own experimentation, and much gnashing of teeth and pulling hairs, I am desparate to get a definative answer to a question that has seemed to baffle a lot of people. It looks like about half say yes, a third say no, and about a fifth say maybe. Please indluge me, have patience, and help me answer this question. I would very much appreciated it!

1) Can I boot Windows XP on an Inspiron 600m from a USB 2.0 dirve?

This system has the latest Intel Mobil Chip Set updates (R58370.exe), BIOS A17, and Dell Notebook System Software (R96945.exe), which I installed recently from oldest to newest (in the order listed). I have run diagnosics from the system boot utility, and all tests pass with no problems (USB, hard disk drives (HDD), and memory). There are no hardware issues.

The USB Emulation setting in BIOS is set to enabled.
The F2 BIOS boot order screen and the F12 one-time boot slection both list USB Storage Devices as available options.

2) I have a generic 160GB USB 2.0 drive which I got at a good price from a CompUSA store closing. Device Manager/Disk Management report it is a Samsung SP1604N. I have run several versions of chkdsk on it, formatted it successfully several times, and run Norton Disk Doctor on it. There are no problems with the drive and it works perfectly fine as a data disk. I can copy, cut, and paste files with Windows Explorer or command mode.

Here is the senario that is causing me so much grief:

3) Using the XP CD that originally came with the 600m purchase (Windows XP Professional v2002 Service Pack 1), I start a clean install. When I boot the CD, it shows the 160GB USB drive and I select that as the target device and partition. The installation routne reports the following steps:

3.a) 'formatting using NTFS Q(uick)', '...setup is copying files...', 'setup is initiating your configuration', and then it shuts down prior to the first reboot in the installation sequence. So far, so good...

3.b) When the reboot starts, the white bar along the bottom of the screen is displayed and filled out, the XP splash screen is displayed (the one with the lights going back and forth), the screen goes blank, and about a minute or so later I get a blue screen crash:

Stop: 0x0000007B (0xF789E640,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)

3.c) When I use F8 to boot using safe mode, it starts listing the files it is reading off the USB drive and the last three files displayed are NTFS.sys, NDIS.sys, and MUP.sys. Then it pauses for a few seconds, and the blue screen crash appears.

So the boot routine recognized the drive, the system partition, and the directory structure and successfully reads files from it. I can also see writes going on to the drive with the activity lights. The initial part of the boot sequence works fine.

3.d) I know from looking at Microsoft knowledge base (article kb/324103 "...troubleshoot 'Stop 0x0000007B errors...'" that there are "device driver issues" and mentions something about a "miniport driver to communicate with the hard disk controller". So it appears that during the boot, control is passed to XP and it no longer can access the USB drive. If this is indeed my problem it leads to some further questions:

3.d.1) If I need to update a driver file, which one? I can copy the replacement file to the drive. (I can boot XP off the internal drive and upgrade the file on the USB drive.

3.d.2) But if I need a new driver file, how do I make sure XP finds it and loads it? Does the boot routine read all files in, say, \windows\system32\drivers? Or does it go by a list of files to load, and where is that list? In the registry? What regedit incantations do I need to do to get that driver loaded. Indeed, how can I regedit a XP system that is not running? (I cannot boot the XP system I need to regedit...)

3.e) I also tried this with a Memorex 4GB Traveldrive and got the exact same symptoms. Should it matter, would it matter, or could it matter whether the device is a "flash" drive or a HDD? (A clean install with the CD mentioned tops out at 3 GB, so theres plenty of room.)

4) Or is that not my problem? What else may be causing the crash? And again, basically, can I boot XP with a USB drive?

I am posting this is several forums to help expedite answers. (Portable - BIOS, Portable - General Hardware, Software - Windows XP)

Again I thank one and all in advance for any help solving this mystery! Thanks!!!

Sterling_Aug · Answer

Try this article: http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=7632&st=62 Using BartPE Windows XP works from USB, but there are a lot of ifs, ands, and but to make it bootable.

TBLADE · Answer

Sterling_Aug,   Thanks! Interesting. I'll pursue that as an option.   In the meantime, I was hoping that I could boot 'real XP'. But Barts P(reinstalled)Environment might be an option.

DeathsOverture · Answer

Sorry made a mistake. Ignore post please. Message Edited by DeathsOverture on 04-28-2007 01:27 AM

pcgeek11 · Answer

The biggest problem with installing REAL XP on a usb device comes from the order in which the USB Drivers are loaded during the installation process. If you do not change these load orders you will never finish an install on a usb device. Never! You will have to copy the XP CD to an ISO then edit several files using an ISO Editor to extract those files, edit them to rearrange the load order for USB Devices and then reinsert those files back into the ISO Image. Then burn that ISO to a CD and use that CD to install XP.

Then once that is done there are many things going on that still may prevent you from booting without a failure. I played with this for a few weeks before giving up. I actually had XP installed on a USB drive and managed to actually boot it a few times. It was unreliable and prone to locking up hard.

Some have claimed to have it working, Those few must be Godlike in their computer knowledge! IMO it is nowhere close to being worth the effort required.

However; Linux on a USB drive is a snap!

Good Luck!

pcgeek11

Message Edited by pcgeek11 on 04-28-2007 10:43 AM

TBLADE · Answer

pcgeek11,    Thank you very much for the info!    I pretty much expected as much. The inanity of Microsoft never ceases to amaze me. I'll give them a little slack with USB 1.x, its newness and lack of speed, to decide not to do boot support, but USB 2.0 has been around for at least 4 years now. I cannot imagine that there has been no request for support for USB boot, and in the 2nd quarter of 2007, they still haven't bother to provide it. Just amazing, and sad...    Yes, I know Linux would work. Any real, robust, and legitimate OS would.   Thanks...

Bay Wolf · Answer

You can also read this web page to find out how to do boot from a USB mem key.

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Boot from USB Drive

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