Using external harddrives?

Question

ok well i have a 2.5' 40gb laptop internal hardrive. i decided to get rid of my old laptop and get a new one. i have the mdg durabook 120gb 1gb ram and 1.73ghz core2 prossessor. since i kept the hard drive i bought an external hard drive enclousure from ebay for it. the enclousure and everything works great i can do everything. but i want to be able to run some programs from the other harddrive that has windows xp pro. is there a way i can get my laptop to boot from the 40gb 'external now' hard drive to access win xp. on my computer the 120gb harddrive it also running win xp pro but i use it for school. i asked a question similar to this when i didnt recieve the enclousure in the mail and people said to make sure my boot sequence in my bois supports booting from a usb device and yes it does. but i dont see how it could matter because this laptop is only 2 months old... soo apreciate the answers thanks! :)

thank you karz but i want to be able to boot xp from the external because my internal is for school and i want to keep it for school only and the external for my personal self so thanks. thats why i needed this enclouser

Answer 1

Boot priority matters. You need to select in BIOS which device you need to boot first. This would be the cumbersome part whenever you want to change booting preference.

Take note that booting/running programs from external drive is much slower than when using internal drive. Also, your old HDD contains different drivers (intended for old laptop). As soon as you boot on that old HDD, Windows will start looking for the drivers of the new laptop. Be ready with the drivers CD. You need to install the new drivers on that old HDD one time only.

Answer 2

The primary purpose of an external hard drive is to quickly do "Back Ups". A very smart thing to do.

Here's a better, smarter way to do what you want:

Create a separate User Account for School on your new system, with strong passwords. Then, log in based on "Home or School". This will keep everything "pigeon holed" for you, and keep your data safe.

THEN, use the external drive to Back Up all your personal and school data EVERY Sunday night.

TIP: There's no real need to back up (Mirror) your 120GB hard drive, if you have your commercial software on CD / DVD and back up all downloaded Program Installation files, also. Besides, the external is way too small.

You'll be glad you did!!!