Can the t61 boot from usb hdd?

Hi all,

I am buying a t61 with Vista pre-installed from my college. I was hoping to take along my hard drive from my current desktop, buy a usb enclosure, and set it as the primary drive and boot straight to the XP Home system that is on there. Can anyone forsee terrible problems for me? Ideally I'd like to dual boot but I hear Vista isn't very nice about that, so I'd be happy with even this.

Thanks!
-Stacy

 

Dual booting vista and xp is not as hard as you may think. Read this:

http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp

Just remember to make your recovery disks before any experiments!

BTW you are aware that xp does not like to boot to a different computer than that which it was initially loaded on. It will blue screen.

 

TPA, thanks. Now, I'm a bit of a noob, so tell me if this is stupid, but is there any way to set things up to dual boot without having to reinstall either OS? My college provides licenses only for Vista, no installation media. I'd like to not have to reinstall XP because my problem is not so much that I'm so enamored with the operating system as it is that I've been using this system for the past few years and I have everything the way I like it.

Thanks!
-Stacy

 

I managed to boot off a USB key but I had to format it with Fat16 file system. I think booting off a portable hard drive will be much more difficult.

 

Not stupid....but...

First, how does someone with over 1000 posts get to be a noob?

Second
according to your original post, the OS you want to use was installed on your desktop, so it would be illegal to use on your laptop. Even if you tried anyway, XP would bluescreen when you tried to boot that same hard drive on your laptop because it would recognize all the hardware differences. So you still would be stuck with a new installation to use XP on an external drive.

If you decided to do a new install of XP, whether on a second partition or an external drive, you could export all your settings and files from your desktop computer using the wizard that is on XP.

I can't really see a way of legally dual booting without having to install at least one OS somewhere. Its really not all that painful, just time consuming.

As far as the media for Vista goes...This should be a preinstall of the os by Lenovo. It should have the recovery hidden partition, and the ability to create recovery media yourself. I believe it is one CD and 2 DVDs (I have a t60 not a t61 so it might be different). After you successfully burn those you should be able to restore your computer if you mess up.

 

Heh, I'm not using my own account; I hate to register for a site where I know I will not use the membership once my problem is resolved.

TPA, thanks for the help. I was not aware of this nifty Files & Settings Transfer Wizard, so possibly I shall just dual boot a new install of my XP Home on the lappy's HD and transfer stuff onto there.