In principle, with modern PCs (say five years or so old or less?), the motherboard ROM BIOS provides for booting from a (any) motherboard USB port. I have never tried to install a working OS (Windows or otherwise) on an external USB drive, but I have installed a drive image utility on a thumb drive and booted from it (OS was FreeDOS). There are some issues with respect to getting the keyboard and mouse to work (enable "legacy USB support" in the BIOS setup), but it works.
In fact, on modern Dell machines, there is a Keypress (F12 on my machines) for bringing up a boot menu for a one-time (anytime) boot-from-wherever, without having to go into the motherboard BIOS setup and change the boot device priority list. Fred Holmes At 10:38 AM 12/12/2009, betty wrote: >With a Windows PC, can you boot from an external drive? If not, can you run >programs from an external drive? > >I do this with my Mac, and run Windows inside VirtualBox, but don't usually >use my husband's PCs. If I plan to install the hard drive in the computer, >I'll run it bare using a drive adapter [USB <-> SATA/ATA] for a short time >until I have a chance to install the drive permanently. > >You may be able to do this on a Dell. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
