What is this about?
To keep the introduction short, Microsoft denies that booting Windows off a USB drive works.
See this page 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 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 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. Read More…
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