Perhaps a bit of a foolish question ...but my mind has gone blank.

Are there any USB 2.0 external hardrives out on the market now that I can install an operating system on and run the O.S. ? Like a dual boot system with a second slave hard drive but in this case the second hard drive would be the USB 2 external HDD.

As I rememeber reading somewhere that this was not possible ... or is it now ?

Thanks.

It IS possible IF the BIOS supports "boot from USB." Check that first.

Thanks for the feedback.

This is my situation ... I have a user up at my northern jobsite which has very basic p.c. skills.

What I want to do is purchase one of these external hard drives ... install W2K Pro or XP Pro on it and then install the warehouse inventory control software on it so that she can take the external hard drive home with her and work within the database.

But as you have indicated I will have to walk her through accessing the BIOS on her home machine to check if indeed boot from USB is supported.

I am wondering what kind of performance can be expected. I have never tested this type of installation so am not sure of what to expect. Have you used this type of boot scenerio before ?

Thanks a lot for the help.

Not like that. I have created a rescue boot disk on a usb flash drive and used that to fix the pc.

The newer external drives are pretty quick. Of course the transfer speeds are a little slower than an internal drive, but it would not be too bad. I use a few of them, though not as the boot drive.