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External Hard Drive

#1 Jesse Bassett

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Posted 08 June 2007 - 10:56 AM

Hello all,
I received a 500GB externeal Hard-drive and have it setup on my laptop. I was wondering if I could install Vista Home Premium on it and access the OS from my laptop? Is this possible, if so, how do I do this?

Thanks for the help,
Jesse

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#2 ØÇë¦òT

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Posted 08 June 2007 - 05:13 PM

Running an OS (especially vista) on an external would give terribley slow performance. USB just doesn't stand up to sata or ata.

#3 Jesse Bassett

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Posted 08 June 2007 - 06:33 PM

so I can't install an OS on the hard-drive?

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#4 ØÇë¦òT

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Posted 08 June 2007 - 07:07 PM

Eh you can (I think), it won't be fast.

#5 dc3

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Posted 09 June 2007 - 01:33 AM

ØÇë¦òT, on Jun 8 2007, 07:07 PM, said:

Eh you can (I think), it won't be fast.

Perhaps I've missed something here but USB 2.0 has a transfer rate of 480 Mb/s, that's not fast?

#6 usasma

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Posted 09 June 2007 - 08:26 AM

The transfer rate isn't all there is to access'. I suppose you could install Vista on it, but the only way to know would be to try. It'll depend on Vista allowing it, along with the ability of your BIOS to accept it. Then the issue of bootability will occur - and you may have to boot from the laptop hard drive in order to access the Vista on the external drive. Then there's the issue of Vista's performance on the laptop through the USB drive.

All in all it'd be easier to install a larger hard drive in the laptop. I run Vista Ultimate on my Toshiba M45 laptop with an 80 gB hard drive and 1 gB of RAM (and some performance tweaks) without any issues.

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