insatallation windows vista external hard drive

I have a DELL XPS M140 Laptop, with 1.73 Ghz Pentium M processor and 1 gig of ram, 80 gig hard drive. I dont want to risk loosing data on my hard drive. Can I install a copy of Windows Vista on my 80 gig external hard drive and create a dual boot system.

No, Vista does not support installing on external hard disk. Sorry. -- Andre Extended64 | http://www.extended64.com Blog | http://www.extended64.com/blogs/andre http://spaces.msn.com/members/adacosta "Sid" wrote in message

I have a DELL XPS M140 Laptop, with 1.73 Ghz Pentium M processor and 1 gig of ram, 80 gig hard drive. I dont want to risk loosing data on my hard drive. Can I install a copy of Windows Vista on my 80 gig external hard drive and create a dual boot system.

That's disappointing. What in your opiniion would be the least risky way of isntalling vista on my laptop? I was thinking of partitioning my hard disk and installing a copy windows vista on the new partition, thus making a dual boot system. How do I go about configuring my system as dual boot?
"Andre Da Costa [Extended64]" wrote:

No, Vista does not support installing on external hard disk. Sorry. -- Andre Extended64 | http://www.extended64.com Blog | http://www.extended64.com/blogs/andre http://spaces.msn.com/members/adacosta "Sid" wrote in message I have a DELL XPS M140 Laptop, with 1.73 Ghz Pentium M processor and 1 gig of ram, 80 gig hard drive. I dont want to risk loosing data on my hard drive. Can I install a copy of Windows Vista on my 80 gig external hard drive and create a dual boot system.

The best bet is probably to just repartition your hard drive in your laptop, and make a dedicated partition for the Vista install. The best and easiest way I've found to repartition is to use GParted. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ You can download a very tiny CD iso from them. It makes a bootable Linux disc which automatically boots into X and run the GParted utility. Pretty simple GUI. I did this with both of the machines I'm using to test Vista, and it worked like a charm. -joe
"Sid" wrote:

That's disappointing. What in your opiniion would be the least risky way of isntalling vista on my laptop? I was thinking of partitioning my hard disk and installing a copy windows vista on the new partition, thus making a dual boot system. How do I go about configuring my system as dual boot?

Use GParted to repartition your laptop drive and make yourself a dedicated Vista partition. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
"Sid" wrote:

That's disappointing. What in your opiniion would be the least risky way of isntalling vista on my laptop? I was thinking of partitioning my hard disk and installing a copy windows vista on the new partition, thus making a dual boot system. How do I go about configuring my system as dual boot?

Use the "GParted" bootable ISO to repartition your laptop drive and make yourself a dedicated Vista partition.
"Sid" wrote:

That's disappointing. What in your opiniion would be the least risky way of isntalling vista on my laptop? I was thinking of partitioning my hard disk and installing a copy windows vista on the new partition, thus making a dual boot system. How do I go about configuring my system as dual boot?

Sorry about the multiple posts. I kept getting told there was an error during posting, and they weren't working... but it appears they were. :)

Thanks for your replies, but I am currently running Windows XP Media Center Edition . Can I still use Gparted to partition my drive ??
"jreiter" wrote:

The best bet is probably to just repartition your hard drive in your laptop, and make a dedicated partition for the Vista install. The best and easiest way I've found to repartition is to use GParted. http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ You can download a very tiny CD iso from them. It makes a bootable Linux disc which automatically boots into X and run the GParted utility. Pretty simple GUI. I did this with both of the machines I'm using to test Vista, and it worked like a charm. -joe
"Sid" wrote: That's disappointing. What in your opiniion would be the least risky way of isntalling vista on my laptop? I was thinking of partitioning my hard disk and installing a copy windows vista on the new partition, thus making a dual boot system. How do I go about configuring my system as dual boot?

Yes. GParted is run from a fully self-contained boot cd. (You just download the ISO file from the GParted website, and burn it to cd.) You then boot onto that CD, and it will boot into a self-contained environment and automatically run the GParted tool. That tool allows you to resize your NTFS partitions. You just shrink one or more of your existing partitions to give you enough space for another partition on which to install Vista. Not sure how big of a partition Vista requires, but I gave myself a 20 gig partition just to have enough space to play around a bit.
The repartitioning is super easy, and works like a charm. -joe
"Sid" wrote:

Thanks for your replies, but I am currently running Windows XP Media Center Edition . Can I still use Gparted to partition my drive ??

I downloaded and looked at the GParted program, but it seemed to indicate it could not create an NTFS file system. Am I correct and if so, how do you create a partition for Vista?
"jreiter" wrote:

Use the "GParted" bootable ISO to repartition your laptop drive and make yourself a dedicated Vista partition.
"Sid" wrote: That's disappointing. What in your opiniion would be the least risky way of isntalling vista on my laptop? I was thinking of partitioning my hard disk and installing a copy windows vista on the new partition, thus making a dual boot system. How do I go about configuring my system as dual boot?