Installing W7 on external HDD.

Sorry if I missed it but is it possible to install Windows 7 on an external USB HDD and boot to it from F12 (my laptop has that option)

 

You know, I re-installed W7 last night on a larger drive and forgot to check whether it listed my external drive as a destination...

I want to say you can do that without an issue. When you start up the installation wizard, it will ask you all the locations to install to, and one of them should be your external drive.

Edit: You should get that list if you choose the 'advanced' setup rather than the 'upgrade' choice.

 

Thanks, I may check it out.

Any ideas that if I install on an external HDD it will be less likely to screw up my work laptop since I don't have a test machine if things go awry?

 

I was also thinking of simply installing windows 7 on an external HDD myself and if it works, than its a lot more convenient than creating a partition on my laptop's internal HDD.

 

I would not even chance it. If you want to try it out, go the virtual machine route by getting Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (which is free) and create a virtual machine with it. There is MUCH less chance of damage should anything go wrong.

 

IT WON'T work i tried it already i doesn't work at all it detected that my hd was connecting with an usb and said it cannot install on a defive that has a usb so don't try it so it's a no go

 

I'm not sure if that will work. When I bought my laptop it was supposed to come with Intel T2300 but they gave me the T2300E instead. From what I understand it doesn't support visualization.

http://ark.intel.com/cpu.aspx?groupId=27234

What do you think?

 

Oh well. I just wanted to check it out but XP works fine. If I do any dual booting it with be with Ubuntu 1st.

 

Even if your processor doesn't support virtualization you can still run a virtual machine. It's just that you'll notice a performance drop as the VM will then have to virtualize all the hardware via software. Windows 7 has been shown to work quite good on netbooks already, so the performance might be the same as those, or slightly slower (very rough guess here ).