Confessions of a cat

UPDATE: (2009/june/10th) - All the below mentioned things are still valid, however I had no luck with installing using this method on my usb drive. I did, however, found the http://usboot.org/ website, and their latest (v. 2.10 this time) version works wonderfully for me. What you need to do to get usboot v2.10 working, in a nutshell:

1. register on their website (you need this later)
2. download the program (a zip file with lots of batch files and stuff)
3. If you do not have a multiboot capable pc, install vmware, or parallels desktop, or qemu or virtualbox (latter 2 are free) - these are virtual machine emulators
4. get a clean copy of windows xp with sp2 or sp3 integrated
5. install this windows in any of the abpve mentioned programs
6. once install is done you may wish to install some drivers for the virtual machine (not required)
7. install usboot, and follow its user guide closely - default options are good
8. with usboot the last step is to copy the files to the usb hard drive - this should be a usb hard drive and not a flash drive, and it should be formatted to fat32 (ntfs puts more burden on it). test if it’s bootable on your computer (check bios settings) - if no luck, use the hp usb disk format tool, that might help.

Many of us have got rid of windows in recent years. Some of you have switched to linux (ubuntu, debian, redhat, you name it), and some of you have turned to Apple’s OS X. Both of them are a better choice in my humble opinion. Anyways, sometimes you just want to play a game that’s only available on windows, or you want to access some hardware for which only a windows application / driver exists. Or you have a PIC programmer and you like Winpic800 (the free programming app), but it only runs on windows.

Many of you have several computers sitting around at home, and you can just keep a windows install on one of them. However if you’re like me, you have one “workhorse” machine, that you spend most of your time in front of. It would be good to have windows at hand when you need it without messing with your internal drive(s).

The net is / was full of articles (from M$) which say that booting windows xp from external USB storage is not possible. You may have heard about BartPE and Windows PE - they are essentially live windows XP images which allow you to run windows xp from a CD / DVD (or even USB) however they are not really the “real deal” - as you are limited in what you can do with them.

Now I needed windows for some hacking with applications that can only be run on windows. But since I use a nice OSX system which I do not want to fuck up and share its space with XP: this solution is the best for me. And maybe for you too.

Of course everything has been already figured out. Here’s the article that I recommend you use:

How to install and run a full windows XP from a USB drive

I mirrored it as a PDF here just in case…

A support forum is also available here if you run into problems

Here’s what you need to do in a nutshell (read the article above or download the pdf for details!):

• get hold of a windows xp install cd / dvd (with a valid license)
• test if your machine can boot with a usb drive (most computers nowadays can)
• have a 20 gig or more external hard drive available (usb stick with at least 2/4 gb can be used as well, but since flash memory is slower and cannot be written to forever I strongly suggest you to use a hard drive) USB 2 is preferred of course, unless you want to limit yourself to cca. 1 mb/sec speeds
• extract a few files from the xp install disk
• edit these files as noted in the linked article
• put the edited files back, burn the disk to a cd / dvd
• unplug all your internal hard drives (if you do not want them to be messed up by windows install)
• plug in your external drive and boot from the disk you just burned

Enjoy