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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…

After careful research done in the Windows XP online community, I’ve decided these command-line shortcuts are best for beginners:

To get more information about any command, type command name /?. Then press Enter.

Shut Down the System

Although shutting down the computer from the Start menu is faster and easier, the shutdown command can also be issued at a command prompt to shut down the computer. The shutdown command also offers parameters to log off a user, restart the computer, and abort a system shutdown. If you ever have to boot to the command-line to troubleshoot a problem, you’ll want to know how this command works. To shut down the computer and experiment with other options:

Other options include -r to restart the system, -m \\computername to shut down a remote computer, and -l to log off of the computer. To see all the options, type shutdown /? at the command prompt.

Convert a FAT File System to NTFS

If your file system is configured as FAT instead of NTFS, you’re missing out on quite a few extra perks. Using NTFS, you get increased security, file compression, disk quotas, and encryption—features you don’t get with FAT. For the pros and cons of both file systems, read Charlie Russel’s article, NTFS vs. FAT: Which is Right for You? If you do decide to convert, it’s quite simple: Read More…