I've seen Windows7 upgrades and the full install packages
for sale at retail. Can you install Windows7 on a portable
hard drive ? The salesmen just don't know. My Seagate 250gb
portable hard drive might look good with a W7 install.
thx.
patrick
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I would say, if someone is asking this a salesman, then the answer is definitely no.
No microsoft operating systems can be installed on portable media just out of the box.
But for someone who wants experiment and has lot of time, yes it is possible. But it also widely depends on what you want do later with the w7.
Do you intend to use it only on your own computer? This is one thing. (you know MS operating systems are fixed to one hardware only , at least this is the design)
Do you want move it around and kind of use it portably? On other computers? What drivers the other computers need for their hardware? Do you know?
How are you going to use it? Boot from the portable media? Well not impossible, but do you have any idea how to make portable drive bootable? Will your computer be able to boot from portable media at all?
Lot of questions I know, but the salesman can not tell yes or know, if you do not supply exactly all answers to those and many more questions.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Yeah I know they're worried about unpaid distributions. If I have say Linux
on my small C: drive and could run W7 on a larger external drive wonderful.
Otherwise I'll have to stick with XP on the C: drive and run Linux on the external hard drive.
With all these .NET Framework updates my 16gb SSD C: drive is too small.
They want over 10gb for install as opposed to about 3gb for XP.
Any ideas how to properly install W7 retail on an external hard drive. That's what
I want to do, not Bill Gates. It's really none of his business what I want to do as long as I pay retail. Fixed or external hard drive installation. It's not worth paying retail if you can't install the thing to your own hardware and register it somehow.
Patrick013
It's not so much a privacy/legal issue as it is a practical issue. To put it simply what you're trying to do Windows was not designed to be able to do. That's not to say it won't work, just that you may have some big problems along the way.
I'm sure with some clever tricks and modification you could get a Toyota Prius to top 130mph, but that isn't what it was originally designed to do. Windows wasn't designed to be run from an external hard drive.
Have you not tried Googling for "running Windows 7 from an external drive", I'm sure there are some sites out there that already have some guides/tutorials or something like that.
and tell how you want use it? Windows7 is operating system not a windows application.
The way how to install it to a portable drive is mostly done by extracting the PE system of it, inserting whole driver collection into the system (incl usb drivers) and then produce again a complete PE based system and installing it on the portable drive.
So this is the basic idea of it.
There are websites with howto for such operations, but this is lot of work and can not be just done by buying the installation disk, enter some command and finish.
To use it, the usb disk has to be bootable and contain proper boot record to make it. It has to have usb drivers from the first moment, since you want load it from usb drive. W7 has no usb drivers in the first PE so normal w7 will not be able to work from it.
Other popular way is to have a virtual machine on the portable disk, then install the w7 into this vitual machine. By that you dont need to modify the w7 and you can install it from the normal installation disc. However note, that this is then rather slow in use and you might not be able to run all software on it. But in this case it is hardware independent, the hardware is the virtual machine itself.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Hi,
I found a manual which claims you can add a second hardware drive to your
system and install w7 from disc to it. But, as usual, it doesn't say if
this drive needs to be fixed or can be a portable or external hard drive.
This is an extension of a dual boot setup, with a second disc as the target
for installation.
Patrick
almost all the NT os's have that capibility. it requires a fixed drive that wont be unplugged or power down while the ram still is powered on.
any reasonable handbook of w7 describes this procedure in all details. You can have more fixed disks in your computer, at home I have one with 3, and install what you want there. Just get a w7 handbook from next library or so.
This has absolutely nothing to do with an installation on a portable, USB connected hard drive. USB connected hard drive is not a hard drive any more, it is a portable removable media connected to the main system via an usb host - usb bus - then inside the adapter or external enclosure there is a controller with usb port on one side and SATA (or IDE) port on the other side.
Even if you would plan to mount new disk as fixed inside your computer and then install w7 onto it as instructed in w7 handbook, if you later take that disk and mount it inside an external enclosure connected to the computer by usb cable, there will be no use for it as you will not be able to boot from that media as there are no usb drivers in such installation during start up.
Try to see some of the problematic for example on site of winbuilder:
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showforum=22
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland