Evening All,

Here's the problem....

Dell Latitude D420 with an internal (1.8" Hitachi 60GB PATA/ZIF) boot drive (XP) and all is fine.

I've set up an external USB drive (1.8" Samsung 120GB PATA/ZIF) which the Dell can see just fine.

I wish to transfer the existing internal drive to the USB enclosure and fit the empty (NTFS formatted) Samsung drive into the Dell. No problem in the mechanics, however...

the Dell will not boot from the USB drive (I assumed it should/would). AFAICT the Dell has no idea the USB drive is even present.

Returned all to square one and again all is fine.

Aside - also connected the USB enclosure (with boot XP HDD fitted) to a Mac - drive mounted and was accessable (could open and read content). Also attached the same USB enclosure with Samsung 120GB fitted and again all OK. So the hardware all seems good.

WHAT do I need to do?

Bear in mind I'm really a Mac bloke...

All meaningful suggestions most welcome

Cheers in advance,

Ian.

Is there an option in the bios to boot from USB? Sometimes that needs to be selected, if it's there that is.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, there is.

I did try this but without any success. As the Samsung was fitted internally (but without anything at all on it) I assumed the BIOS would seek through all options until it found a bootable volume...

Or, are you saying I should specifically set USB booting as the 1st option in the BIOS?

What is the OS and why are you doing this exactly?

If you're trying to boot into XP via USB then it's unlikely to work. XP doesn't load the USB drivers early enough to actually boot up unless you've modified the install. If you're trying to boot to a Dell recovery partition, I doubt that will work over USB either.

I'm guessing you want to put the bigger drive in the laptop and install Windows on it, then use the smaller drive in the USB enclosure? If so you have various options:

1. Install the 120GB drive and install your OS from CD, then copy your data back over via USB. This is the preferred option because you get a "clean" install. The licence should be stuck to the laptop.
2. Boot from the original drive internally, then create a recovery disk and a full backup. Restore this onto the new drive once fitted.
3. With the original drive in the laptop, use some disk cloning software to copy it to the larger drive via USB. You can then fit the bigger drive internally. You may then have to do some repair work to make it boot properly.

Not quite...

the plan is to fit the 120GB internally and turn the Dell into a Hackintosh running Snow Leopard.

I don't want to partion the 120GB in order to dual boot OS X/Windows XP - but would prefer to have the original 60GB XP available as a USB boot drive.

Or am I expecting too much with regard to XP booting from USB?

It's not impossible, but will require quite a lot of work. A random google finds this thread which looks accurate enough:

http://forums.ngine.de/viewtopic.php?t=1243

detailed instructions on the linked thread: http://forums.ngine.de/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2369

Many thanks !

Had a (very brief) look and will examine in detail tomorrow.

When I've summoned the courage to give it a go I'll report back with whatever results!

Cheers,

Ian.

Looks like a lot of fun. After my first proper fiddle ever with Linux this week, I'm looking forward to reading about your results.

Decided not to make the external HDD a Windoze boot drive...

it just seemed too complicated and time consuming to justify the limited use I "thought" I might have for an MS OS!

However, now have a Dell Latitude D420 and D430 running SL10.6.8 with *everything working fine (*bar the SD card reader which nobody seems able to get working - O2Micro CCID SC Reader).

The D430s original 40GB PATA/ZIF HDD is now in an external enclosure and is bootable running SL10.6.8.

Total cost of the project (2 Dells, 1 x Dell docking station which has a built-in DVD/CDRW drive + ports & 1 external enclosure) was approx. £230.

In addition I purchased 2 new 120GB PATA/ZIF HDDs (total £140) and upraded the RAMM (2GB module from Crucial £19.19 delivered) in the D420 to 2.5GB (was originally 1.5GB IMMIC). The D430 came with max. memory of 2GB.

The D420 arrived with a 60GB HDD running XP - I managed to drop this on the kitchen floor at one point when fiddling about with the external enclosure - drive died!

Finally, each Dell now believes itself to be a MacBookAir!

This post from the D420.



PS - for a long time I've been less than complimentary about Dells but it's now time to eat my words. The (12") D series Latitutes are great machines with excellent hardware and good build quality.

I'm casting envious eyes on the (13") Vostro series - very smart, robust Ali case, very thin and light. Methinks their owners are reluctant to part with them... used prices are still too high for my taste