Booting from a USB connected external drive

[sefs]

Hi all,

I've got Ubuntu 8.04 installed on this computer here. I've got another computer that just died with windows 2000 on it.

What I would like to do is take the win 2000 disk put it into an external enclosure and boot from it as needed. Is it possible to get this done?

That is have my ubuntu machine as normal, but then be able to plug in a usb external drive with the windows disk and boot from that.

How can i do this.

[Herman]

:) Hello sefs,
You should be able to rescue all of your important files from the Windows drive from the broken by placing it in the external USB enclosure and plugging it into the Ubuntu computer (without booting it).
I would be rather reluctant to try to boot it, mainly just because Windows is a proprietary operating system and it's only designed to work in one computer. It's not the same as Linux operating systems like Ubuntu which you can just move from one machine to another.
If you want to keep your Windows OS, I think the only way is to fix the computer it belongs to. Unfortunately that's one of the problems with proprietary operating systems.
I'm not sure, but I have heard that some versions of Windows might even be able to more or less self-destruct if they sense too many hardware changes and think they are being 'pirated'. At least you'll probably need to install a lot of different drivers and it could be a hassle.
Ubuntu is far better than WIndows anyway, I would just switch to Ubuntu and not bother with Windows anymore. :)

[sefs]

I don't need to rescue the files...but if i could boot from a usb then i would not have to expense my self in a new computer. I just wondered if it was possible to boot an OS from an external drive.

[Herman]

Well theoretically, you should be able to boot it, but I don't think Microsoft will like you doing that if they find out.