Filed under: Hacks, How-tos, Tips and tricks
Boot XP from external USB drive without Boot Camp
jarpy has an interesting post up on installing Windows XP to an external USB hard drive without using Boot Camp to repartition his internal drive. This method makes use of the Open Source rEFIt utility which we've mentioned before. The process itself looks somewhat risky (e.g. jarpy disconnected his internal drive to avoid corrupting his OS X install) and playing around with third-party boot loaders is always potentially dangerous in my opinion. However, the payoff of a USB-bootable Windows drive is rather appealing, so it might be worth a look for some of you. Proceed at your own risk. If any of you decide to get this working, please share your experiences in the comments.[Via Digg]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
HolyJaw said 4:44AM on 12-28-2006
Hmmm... this would be fun to try with an iPod...
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Alan L. said 3:48PM on 12-28-2006
I installed reefit, and I have to say its great. Although the flashy colors, I'm not a big fan of. Installation was quite simple, and uninstallation would be simple too. Although, I don't have enough space on a external harddrive except for my nano, I wouldn't really waste my time to try and install XP all over again.
Reefit, is quite safe and if you're already using a mac, then believe me, its very easy to install.
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Rick said 3:50AM on 1-05-2007
Hey, I got this working on my Intel Macs, thanks very much to emanual and jarpy's write-ups.
My USB Drive is a La Cie 80G, with a Toshiba drive inside.
The hardest part of the process for me was trying to cabarc and extract the cab files back and forth (as mentioned on the ngine.de site).
Should you decide to try it, this should make your life a LOT simpler. The instructions on the ngine.de site are pretty sparse when it comes to the cab SDK part (”cabarc”) commands.
I myself am very allergic to command line interfaces, and can’t navigate around them for doo doo.
However, the SDK contains 3 .exe files that allow you, if you locate them *in the same file folder” that you place the
USBBOOT.INF, DOSNET.INF, TXTSETUP.SIF, USB.IN_, USBPORT.IN_, USBSTOR.IN_
files in, to just drag and drop those files on the .exe apps and BADOING!
You’ve either extracted or archived the cabinet files. No command line wizardry necessary.
To reiterate, I now have the *same XP external disk* that runs on my Intel chipped:
MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac 20″, and iMac 17″. ( Don't have an Intel Mac Mini, but I can confirm it works like a charm on all the others.)
If I’m not following the letter of the law with Microsoft, I’m sure a lot closer to the spirit, since I am only running it (and only CAN run it) on one machine at a time.
If you do it with a MacBook, it's as easy as cake (and quick!) to pop out/in the Mac's hard drive.
After all my Boot Camp Double booting, farting around with Parallels and VMWare Fusion, this is really the best solution for me, most of all because I don't have to take up *any space at all* on my Mac's hard drives to run XP now, and between the four Macs, there's one SINGLE XP install.
Rick
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