Is this possible? backing up dual boot os to external hard drive

i have a 250gb internal hard drive on my laptop. around 230gb is usable. My system is dual booted with ubuntu 10.10 and windows xp. i split the internal hard drive into 3 partitions, One is 170gb for windows xp, the second is for the ubuntu partition around 60gb and the third is for the ubuntu EXT partition.

My question is that I currently have a 2tb external hard drive, if i create 4 partitions on the external hard drive with One partition being 1.8TB just used for storage data and basiclly using it as a regular external hard drive. Then if i create 3 extra partitions, one 170gb, and one 60gb and another partition for the windows xp, ubuntu, and EXt partition respectively and then use Easus partition manager to copy is respective OS partition on my laptop's internal hard drive to their respective external hard drive partition, WOULD I BE ABLE TO BOOT windows xp and ubuntu normally, similar to booting from the laptop's internal hard drive, but instead from the external hard drive?

 

Windows doesn't do external boot to Windows it requires it be installed on C:\ drive to boot to windows...this is for security and programming reasons.

 

Windows will boot from a drive connected with eSATA, but it will not boot from USB.

 

Really? i could swear i was able to boot form my internal hard drive back then even when i first formatted the drive name as D:\ instead of C:\

 

I think it should work fine, I would clone/copy the partitions (using copy disk option if there is one or you can try macrium reflect or minitool partition , both free) over first then format the unused space.

Not sure about XP though, but 7 and 8 definitely boot over USB-SATA bridge fine.

 

Where is that info? But newer laptops and smaller laptop no longer have the port that I recall so that wouldn't work.

Also to your booting to a windows doesn't seem to be support just looking found a link you can boot but not to Windows desktop. Have you done this yourself?

How to create bootable USB drive in Windows.

 

The partition letter is a Windows thing. There's no drive letter in the partition table, so outside the context of the specific OS install it doesn't exist. You can assign different letters to the same partition on different installs if you like.

 

The fact that eSATA works is from my own testing, I tried booting the original drive that came in my M6700 from its eSATA port and while it insisted on doing a chkdsk, it booted and operated fine. However, I couldn't get it to boot from USB.

EDIT: From doing a little research, looks like Windows 7 is bootable from USB, dunno what went wrong when I tried it.

 

I have windows on fixed disk type boot through USB on multiple machines. better yet, win 7 and 8 can be booted using vhd format and thus no need parition.
Removable type should work but I never tried my self.