Hello. I would like to boot from an external USB 2.0 hard drive. My
BIOS does support this feature (it would appear), however after
cloning my hard drive, testing that it will boot from inside the
computer, and moving it to the external chassis, this is what happens:

I power on the computer, and in the BIOS, I notice that the USB drive
has been recognized and I can use the 'up' and 'down' arrows to set
the boot priority, so that the USB drive boots before the internal
drive. I then save and exit.

The computer continues to boot, and I notice that it IS booting from
the external USB drive, however just after the XP splash screen comes
up, the computer flashes a blue screen for about 1/2 second, and then
reboots, and the whole process starts over again. It never gets that
far. The blue screen just says that the computer will shut down to
prevent damage to my system. Nothing more specific than that.

I'd love to get the computer to boot all the way from the USB drive. I
am using  a Toshiba P25 laptop, Phoenix BIOS, and an Pyro external USB
2.0 drive.

Thanks for the answers. 

    - Regards, Ben

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 20 Jul 2003 21:50 PDT

ben1000...

At your own risk, you might try booting the drive inside your
computer and then go to 'Start -> Settings -> Control Panel
-> System -> Advanced tab -> Startup & Recovery button' and,
under 'System failure', uncheck 'Automatically reboot'.

Then try the drive in your USB chassis. This may allow 
Windows to finish booting, and let you go to 'Administrative
Tools -> Event Viewer' and find out what the error messages
are. On the other hand, it may just reboot anyway, if the
system senses a serious enough threat to its integrity.

If you give this a try (and you're able to get back here)
let me know whether it worked.

sublime1-ga

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Clarification of Question by ben1000-ga on 20 Jul 2003 22:51 PDT

I tried that, and all that changes is that it no longer reboots after
showing the vague error screen I mentioned earlier. Nothing of
interest in the event log, unfortunately, and the error message points
to nothing specific.

    - Regards, Ben

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 20 Jul 2003 23:17 PDT

ben1000...

You state that it "no longer reboots after showing the 
vague error screen". Does this mean that Windows stays
booted, or that it just shuts down without rebooting?
I'm assuming that, since your goal was to get Windows
to "boot all the way", that it must be just shutting
down, but it would be better to have this confirmed.

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Clarification of Question by ben1000-ga on 21 Jul 2003 00:17 PDT

Yes, it still does not boot all the way, but rather than rebooting
after the blue screen, it merely stays on the blue screen until I
press the power switch.

Regards, Ben

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Request for Question Clarification by slawek-ga on 21 Jul 2003 09:24 PDT

Good Day ben1000,

Was the original you cloned from installed on the machine you are
trying to boot from now?  If you installed it on a any other machine
than the one you are trying to use it on, the problem is most likely
with the previously detected hardware.  It is almost impossible to
install an operating system on one machine, take out the hard drive,
and put it into another machine with a different mother board and
hardware.

Sometimes this can be done with a desktop if you take out all the
expansion cards, and just boot with the video card, let windows do
it's thing, and then add one item at a time with a reboot in between
(sound card, ethernet adapter, usb card, etc). I have never tried that
myself, but have been told about it a few times.

If you installed WinXP in a different hardware environment, I can give
you some pointers as to what might (and I underline "might") help you
get the operating system started on your laptop after having installed
it elsewhere. If you don't have much on the USB drive, I would suggest
an operating system reinstall using the laptop that is to boot up the
drive.

Regards,
Researcher slawek-ga.

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Clarification of Question by ben1000-ga on 21 Jul 2003 10:20 PDT

Yes, the drive was cloned from the original drive in the machine, and
I have tested it out installed in the machine, and it boots that way,
so there are no hardware detection issues.

    Thanks - Ben

Ben...

A search of the ADS site for the word 'bootable' returns no results.
://www.google.com/search?q=bootable+site%3Awww.adstech.com

A search of the site for the word 'boot' turns up a FAQ which asks
"Can I use the Pyro Drive Kit as my boot drive?"

The answer:
"On the Mac Platform, yes."
http://www.adstech.com/support/faq/faqanswers.asp?id=8#8

It appears that there may also be newer drivers available for
download.

Sorry I couldn't find anything more helpful.

sublime1-ga

A hunchish bit of theory, because I don't have a USB bootable machine
to try this with or know if this is all the answer or maybe none of
it.

"boot.ini" (hidden, protected file in root of partition containing the
\sysdir)tells NTLDR what disk and partition to boot from (and allows
multi os boot menu at startup).
You cloned the disk in the USB enclosure from the one already in your
machine so the boot.ini entry on it references your internal hard disk
as the one to boot from (say something like
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1) for a basic IDE/ATA based setup or
scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)for a SCSI based system. Thus the
disk works fine in the machine but not in the USB box.

Rusty on the syntax used in boot.ini (a Linux lover would know the
Mult(0)... stuff better) but win 2000 help gives vague instruction on
booting using a USB flash disk and here I quote from the book of
Bill"In Notepad, open Boot.ini and edit it as follows:
Replace all instances of rdisk(0) with rdisk(1). 
In addition, if your have a SCSI hard drive, replace all instances of
scsi(0) with multi(0). "

Not the answer but a start I hope ?

Wow Ben's experience of trying to boot from an external usb drive is
precisely my own and I haven't found a solution yet, but it is nice to
know im not alone in the universe.

I'm having the exact same problem trying to boot Windows XP from a USB drive.
The only difference is that I installed directly onto the USB drive.  No
swapping of the drive from inside the machine to the USB enclosure.  The install
went fine, and when it tries to come up after the install, I get the black
XP Pro window and then the BSOD.  So the problem doesn't seem to be
boot.ini related in this case.

Something of interest from the MS support site.
The poster of this question didn't put in any information on what the
error screen said - I assume it was a BSOD.

Mine has this as part of it:
STOP: 0x0000007b (<value>, <value>, <value>, <value>

This support answer seems to deal with it, but it's dense.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q324103

Ben... 
 
It seems that the link I provided in my comment above has become
outdated, and newer information has been added, so I'm updating
the information here:
 
A search of the site for the word 'boot' turns up a FAQ which asks 
"Can I use the Pyro Drive Kit as my boot drive?" 
 
The answer: 

"On the Mac Platform, yes. Please go to this link from Apple:

 http://til.info.apple.com/techinfo.nsf/artnum/n58606

 On the PC Platform, no motherboards available in the MARKET
 support this yet."
http://www.adstech.com/support/faq/faqanswers.asp?id=8#8

Ben, i have the same kind of machine, toshiba p25-s507 and want to
leard if it s possible to boot from an external usb drive, becouse my
hard drive is damaged and sent it to warranty, so while the
replacement arrives i want to work with an external drive, but before
buying it i want to know if its possible, please if you found a way to
do so, please please let me know, i will really appreciate it, thanks
in advance!