[Help] Need to Boot XP home from Flash drive

[karuna]

Hi,

I have removed Harddisk from my system and connected Flash drive using

IDE adapter. Then i installed XP home using cd.

After installation is over it says to "remove if any floppy is in

floppy drive and press ENTER to start".

I have pressed ENTER. But then in starting it is saying that " DISK

ERROR Press any key to Restart"

My bios is OPTIPLEX 170L series and its version is A07.

Please tell me how to solve this problem..

Thanks

Karuna.

[TravisO]

Just FYI, I sure hope you don't plan on using the flash drive as your desktop OS or anything.

Flash Drives have a very limited lifespan, older ones will get failures at only 10,000 read/writes and newer ones die somewhere between 100,000 and 1million read/writes. Booting and using an OS in a flash drive can destroy it very quickly.

Here's a news article about running XP on your thumbdrive

http://www.informationweek.com/windows/sho...cleID=177102101

Edited February 1, 2006 by travisowens

[eyeball]

holy crap!

i need to start backing up all the important stuff that is on my flash pen!

[hougtimo]

from his post i think he means hes taken a hard drive out of his machine, and got a external caddy for it, not a flash drive at all. Now I have tried to run xp like this, and while you *can* (its not easy) get it to work it is very slow, especially if your not using USB2. Hope this helps

EDIT :: After reading original post again, i think i misunderstood. Oh well...

Edited February 1, 2006 by hougtimo

[Sonic]

If you keep cdrom in drive, and don't press any key to boot on cd, windows boot normally ? have you finished the gui part of install of winxp ?

[karuna]

I kept my cdrom in drive itself and tried but that also giving DISK ERROR..

first Windows partition setup only installed..

Then it is restarting... And Giving DISK ERROR..

GUI is not installed yet..

I am not using USB Thumbdrive...

I connected my Compact Flash drive in IDE port of MotherBoard using Compact Flash to IDE (CF/IDE) Adapter..

[Sonic]

I think the actual partition of your drive isn't bootable, try to delete partition and recreate/reformat drive within first installation part. Don't keep actual partition, setup will rewrite boot sector & mbr.

[LLXX]

Just FYI, I sure hope you don't plan on using the flash drive as your desktop OS or anything.

Flash Drives have a very limited lifespan, older ones will get failures at only 10,000 read/writes and newer ones die somewhere between 100,000 and 1million read/writes. Booting and using an OS in a flash drive can destroy it very quickly.

Here's a news article about running XP on your thumbdrive

http://www.informationweek.com/windows/sho...cleID=177102101

Actually, it's only the write cycles that are harmful. Read lifespan is essentially infinite, but with every erase and rewrite, the memory degrades slightly. By making it copy all the files to a ramdrive and then running from ramdrive, it is possible to prolong the life of the drive (and increase the speed greatly). I don't know if this is possible for XP, but I am aware that it can be done for DOS and 98se.

If the BIOS is able to mount USB storage devices as emulated hard disks and completely hide the fact that it's a USB device, booting should be possible. Otherwise XP will interfere as it sees a new "USB storage device" attached and try to initialise it. That is most likely the source of the error message.

[karuna]

I did it.......

the problem is with partition...... I solved it..

Thanks to all...

Karuna