C600 Boot from external HDD via USB

Question

I have a C600 Latitude that I'm trying to run Xp Home on. It have had the worst time trying to get it set up, but what I want to do is install XP on a desktop hard drive in an external case, and connect it via USB to the laptop and boot from that. The is no USB boot option in the boot menu, and the bios does not seem to have one at all. Is their a bios upgrade I can get to fix this? Also, I do not have a disket drive, so I'll need to do all this through a cd drive. Any advice I can get would be helpfull. Thanks in advance.

strykr0 · Answer

I just need the bois upgrade. I actually think that my cd drive is bad, and I should be able to replace that and install XP no problem. In theory anyway, nothing has gone right with this thing.
XP will boot from a USB hard drive, but only if its connected to the computer it was originaly installed on. If its moved to another machine, the drivers for the chipsets don't match, and the OS can't talk to the hardware. Instant blue screen of death. If anyone knows were to get a cd drive cheap, let me know.

NemesisDB · Answer

if you don't see the USB option you're likely out of luck. you could try updating to the latest bios (via CD) if you aren't currently at it -- but I think this is unlikely to help.

oh, and windows XP cannot be booted from a USB hard drive -- sorry.

NemesisDB · Answer

generally from what I've seen XP will put the swap file and MBR on the internal drive. if you've gotten it to put the swap on an external drive, I'd be interested?

as for the bios update it needs to be run from a dos environment. you'd need either a working floppy or CD drive to accomplish this -- or a seperate partition with something like dos or freedos installed on it that you could boot to.

are you certain the newer bios will even add the boot to USB functionality?

strykr0 · Answer

I can start from dos. The drive works to an extent, but when it tries to read at slower speeds, it stops compleatly. I think the contro chip is shot.
I'm not sure it will add USB boot, but I can hope...

sddjd · Answer

Can any of you help me with creating a bootable cd from the latest bios update file? I do not have a floppy drive with my C600, and of course the dell file for hd-based bios update runs temporarily, then tells me I need to create a floppy to install the bios. It won't extract to a folder, but insists on a floppy drive.

Thanks Dell for the floppy-less file that tells me I have to use a floppy... My favorite is that it states that AFTER I perform this update I will be able to use floppy-less in the future... what good news...

NemesisDB · Answer

This site has a C600 bios in ISO (CD Image) form: http://www.bay-wolf.com/flashbios.htm Not sure if it's the revision you're after or not.

stonent · Answer

Dell didn't start to add this functionality to any of their computers until about 2002.

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C600 Boot from external HDD via USB

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