[Widows]

Hi, am wanting to get some advice to see if an idea I had the other day would be possible to implement.

I do a fair bit of music production on my PC and sometimes take my tower to other peoples houses to do the work. I was wondering if it's possible to put windows on an external drive then put all the programs etc I would have on my internal HDD (basically making a double of my internal HDD) so I would basically have my entire system on a prtable hard drive, eliminating the need to take my tower out of the house.

Im thinking this would also mean that if I have the same problem Im having at the moment where my internal system drive fails, I can boot from the external HDD, copy over any files I need from the system drive and then perform any repairs / reinstall Windows safe in the knowledge I wont lose any data I need.

So, anyone able to tell me if this will work?

cheers
James

[hansmax]

I have mostly heard that external drives can't be made bootable. (It's possible that somebody has come up with a hack or a new and improved motherboard, though.) The bigger problem is that this drive would no doubt have all the wrong hardware drivers installed for the system that you were trying to boot on. I'm guessing that this would make the process impossible, or at least impossibly difficult.

[Widows]

ah shame, yeah I hadnt thought about the drivers issue there, ah well. I'm just gonna go buy a huge externall HDD and save everything from both hard drives on there as a backup instead then

thanks for the info

[DoubleHelix]

No, it's not possible.

[fairnooks]

eSata works but then yeah, you run into the alien hardware problem. Works on identical systems though for all the practicality that that's worth.

[raybro]

I suggest your most practical solution would be to get yourself a laptop compatible with your music production requirements and copy all the relevant files from your desktop to the laptop. Flash drives work great for that process. If there are no software issues involved, you could use a flash drive alone for the process. They make them pretty large now. If the flash drive seems practical, I suggest having 2 with the same data. they are not, in my experience, the most reliable storage medium available.

Raybro