booting an eide external with Windows XP

The Puter has two HDs. One internal SATA and one EIDE external connected with a USB cable. If I turn on the BIOS for the external drive will I be able to boot a Windows XP from that drive and also boot from the SATA drive with dual booting?? Using System Commander by Avanquest for the dual booting, partitioning and copying windows XP from the sata to the eide drives.
Thanks for any help..

 

Hello, first there is problem when you boot XP from USB after install. MS resets USB ports and so produce a BSOD error. Maybe MS did this to stop spreading there XP. There has been some big effort collaboration workarounds but it involves lengthy process. Once you get it working that is if you think the effort worth it for you, then you can take an image. I got it working in 2006 using usboot. I was hoping to use this so i could carry around a bootable USB with diagnostic tool to fix multiple PC's but the trouble it it only good for 1 PC you configure it on which be ok for your needs. Soon as the stick is configured for 1 PC and that hardware a EWF driver is needed and installed so it makes the stick readonly so no more writes can be made which stops wearing out the stick with too many writes. The EWF can be turned off for external hard drive as it a normal hard drive not flash.

http://www.usboot.org/tiki-index.php - This works best
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=14181
http://www.ngine.de/article/id/8

and it also possble to install XP from USB instead of CD.
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=5306&hl=

alternatively
do your PC have eSATA? you could connect the IDE to SATA with a converted connector.

alternatively
get a ATA/133 Host Adaptor and feed the cable from there to your IDE hard drive.