Is it possible to format an external USB drive with XFS or EXT3 ?

Greetings all.
I am running a 2,8Ghz 8x core with 6Gb ram. I have a NAS, (Buffalo Pro Duo Linkstation) which has a built in linux which saves data using XFS (I think). It has a built in backup routine, but the drive it backs up to MUST be in XFS or EXT3 (Fat 32 works but it drops all files over 2GB ;( ... ) So - here's my question:
How can I format the external USB drive (A seagate freeagent) in XFS or EXT3 so that it can run on my Buffalo? My preference is to use a GUI mac program (does one exist?) or to use a command line UNIX command (FSK? - but then, how????). I could also use (GASP!) a windows utility on parallels, or even install a linux distro via parallels. But it should be easy I hope...
Looking forward to any ideas/thoughts, tips, etc.
thanks and best to all from Berlin,
Jason

Download a "Live CD" (one you can boot of into running copy of Linux without having to install anything; for example, [OpenSUSE Live CD|http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.0/iso/cd/openSUSE-11.0-GNOME-Li veCD-x86_64.iso]).
Use OS X' Disk Utility to burn it to a CD.
Insert the CD you just burned (if it ejected afterwards), and then restart your Mac.
Hold down the 'C' key on the keyboard as the Mac boots, and it should switch to booting off the CD. Once the CD starts loading, you can let go. It will take a couple of minutes, but it will eventually boot into Linux.
Attach your USB drive.
Run gparted (you need to search the menus for it, it's under system administration, I think -- or you can open up a terminal window and simply type 'gparted').
Find your disk (/dev/sdb or /dev/sda) and partition and format it using the filesystem you want.
When done, restart the computer. You'll boot back into Mac OS X and have an EXT2/EXT3/XFS formatted external drive (that OS X won't recognize, by the way).

Similar Messages

Is it possible to format an external hard drive on my mac?

I purchased a portable external hard drive to back up my former pc in the hopes of using it on my mac. Obviously, I did not research this seeing now that I can integrate my files and photos from my pc to my mac. It appears possible to format the external hard drive to my mac os, which should be done prior to downloading files from my pc to the hard drive. Has anyone dealt with this or am I the only idiot that purchased the external hard drive thinking that was the thing to do before my pc dies completely?

A HD formatted in EXFAT will transfer data between both PC and Mac.
However dont make the titanic error most do in having merely a single external HD backup of your data, thats a tragedy waiting to happen.
HD are cheap as dirt.
Ideal situation is 3 HD , 1 for Mac backups, 1 for data archives stored away safely and updated as needed / often.
and a 3rd HD in Exfat for data transfers (or a thumb drive for the same thing to save $$)

When I try to format an external usb drive the progress bar only goes half way then freezes up can anybody help please

When I try to format an external usb drive the progress bar gets to half way then freezes , or stops and what ever time I allow it never gets any futher on , I have to go to the task bar and click quit to get on and the usb drive is not formatted is there a fault with my disk utility program I have updated the system
to lion 10.7.2
Can anybody advise please

Are these new external drives? How are the currently formatted? Have you tried doing this:
Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Security button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

Cannot mount external USB drive with FDisk_partition_scheme

Due to some recent mac issues in my lab, we updated one of the computers to Maverick 10.9.4 from Snow Leopard 10.6.8 yesterday. Anyhow, this seems to have erased the ability of the mac to read or mount several identical USB drives with the NTFS format (WD My Passport Ultra 500GB USB3.0). It could do it yesterday when it was OSX 10.6.8, but not today (OSX 10.9.4). The drives still work fine on other OSX 10.6.8, Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04 computers (this is appears to be a problem with the Maverick 10.9.4 operating system itself, rather than the flash drives which work flawlessly with every other computer I've tried). I want to remove data from the computer to create backups on the USB drives (no, I don't want to create an online backup or buy a new set of USB drives).
diskutil can see the drives, but cannot verify or repair them as they lack a GUID (GPT) partition scheme. I'm assuming this is the root of the problem. Manually mounting the drives does not work. Installing the ntfs-3g driver also did not work (I was using this to write to the NTFS drives until we upgraded OS's). Installing the WD Passport drivers for OSX also did not work. How do I get the mac to mount these drives?
I could reformat one USB drive and then copy to the others, but this would be extremely inconvenient and take days of copying files back and forth (and would prefer to fix the mac rather than go through this with every NTFS drive I own). If I did this, the FAT32 hard drive format would not be suitable, as format is unable to handle the extremely large sequencing datasets I need to transfer. I'm not super familiar with hard drive formats, but in the event we cannot get Maverick to actually work could someone possibly suggest a format able to handle large file sizes (the largest file I need to move is ~60GB) and be compatible with Windows 8.1 / OSX 10.9.4 / Ubuntu 14.04 as well?
Another workaround I thought of would be just to install an Ubuntu partition on the mac and get the files off through the Linux install. Which is also inconvenient, but would probably be faster than trying to reformat the drives and copy everything over onto them again given the amount of data I want to transfer.
Unrelated, but is there any way to view files and folders in the OSX root directory besides through Terminal? It seems like this functionality was also removed when we "upgraded" from Snow Leopard. (At this point, if it were up to me I would wipe all of the macs we own and replace them with Ubuntu... even the most minor of tasks always require some sort of workaround with them... at my wits end here ).

Yeah this definitely appears to be a problem specifically with this mac. It's been having all sorts of weird problems lately, and we figured that upgrading to Maverick might fix them (but instead we got new problems).
To give an update on this, I ended up reformatting one of the drives to HFS+ and disabled journaling. It now recognizes the drive again, and I'm pulling the files off that way. I looked at exFAT, but it looks like HFS+ has much better Linux support (Windows is read-only but that's only a minor annoyance, as the algorithms to process the data only run on UNIX machines anyways). It's a shame I couldn't keep using NTFS (had to copy over literally EVERYTHING again...) but whatever. Again, no solution for the issue (where this mac can't read NTFS drives).
@rkaufmann87 - To give a bit more explanation, we recently had to disable online backups because apparently the sheer amount of data causes Time Machine to freeze the computer and fail every time it has a scheduled backup (original issue we thought that upgrading to Maverick would solve... didn't work). The hard drive has been having a lot of issues when it begins to reach max capacity as well. So I am pulling off all of my files to external hard drives and deleting the local copy before we attempt to back up online again. And the data would probably take me a year and a lot of money to recreate (for the curious, it's high throughput sequencing data). I'm choosing not to take any chances as a result.

External USB drive with 3000 N100

Hi,
Good to be here - first post!
Needing more capacity I bought a Seagate FreeAgent Go 2.5 inch 120GB drive that draws its power from the computer using two USB ports.
I could not get this to work at all - it seemed be a hardware issue with the drive: it made a bleeping sound and was not detected by the computer. It also seriously upset the Lenovo and I had to do a hard reboot by disconnecting the battery, after which it ran normally (but the Seagate still didn't work at all).
I then connected the Seagate to my desktop PC with the same (negative) result.
So, was the Seagate dead from the word go? Or was there a power issue with the Lenovo that killed it?
I've checked that my Lenovo has the latest BIOS, and all its WinXP Pro updates are up to date. What success, or otherwise, have others had with portable external drives with the 3000 N100?
Best wishes

Thanks to all for their suggestions. The final outcome was a bit of a surprise - it works! Depending upon which USB ports you plug into (this drive, like many other portable ones) uses two USB ports to supply extra power). It would appear that the Lenovo uses "some" power from the USB for internal devices - the built-in webcam being one. Examining the USB ports in Device Manager shows which ports are "used", although I confess the information is not easy to interpret. It looks like this drive needs the full 1 amp (2 x 500mA) from the two ports. On the 3000 N100, using the two ports on the right, nearest the front of the PC, seems do do the trick.
The same applied to my desktop - the two ports I plugged into originally shared a common 500mA supply and that's why the drive didn't work. Again, finding two "independent" ports did the trick.
So it might mean that the Lenovo is a bit marginal in regard to supplying power from the USB ports

Is it possible to connect an external USB 2.0 hard drive to a Thunderbolt Display?

Hello,
Is it possible to connect an external USB 2.0 hard drive to a Thunderbolt Display and back up a MacBook Air to the external hard drive using Time Machine?
I intend to connect my MacBook Air to the Thunderbolt Display using a Thunderbolt cable.
I would also like to connect my printer via USB 2.0 to the Thunderbolt Display. Will this also work?
Effectively using the Thunderbolt Display as a USB hub or docking station.
Regards,
Ben

Ok, thanks.
My 1 cable to ThunderBolt Display objective
MacBook Air -> (via 1 x Thunderbolt cable) -> Thunderbolt Display -> (via 1 x USB cable) -> USB 2.0 external hard drive
I would like to know if this configuration is possible and Time Machine will run correctly.
Your 2 cable suggestion (I think)
MacBook Air -> (via 1 x Thunderbolt cable + 1 x USB cable) -> Thunderbolt Display + USB 2.0 external hard drive
This configuration requires 2 cables to disconnect/reconnect from my MacBook Air.

Disk Utility Not Formatting External USB Drive

Hello,
I recently upgraded to Leopard.  Around this same time, my company purchased two, 1 Terabyte USB External drives for my coworker and I in the graphics/web development department.  They arrived this morning and we were very excited.
My problem is that I cannot get Disk Utility to erase/format the new, external USB TB drive for use with my MBP.  Disk Utility fails almost immediately with the following message:
"*Disk Erase Failed*
Disk Erase failed with the error:
File system formatter failed."
The options I'm choosing for the Erase are:
Volume Format: MAC OS EXTENDED  (i've even tried the 'journaled' version too)
Name: TB
As soon as I hit 'Erase' I get the error message I listed above.  The volume never mounts on my desktop and does not exist.  I can see the drive itself in the System Profiler, so my Mac sees it, it just can't format it!  I've also made sure all my permissions were repaired, so I'm just a little confused as to why this simple task keeps failing?
Is there some additional, esoteric step that I'm missing?
My coworker was able to get his disk to work because he did NOT have Time Machine turned on yet.  When he connected his new TB drive, Time Machine asked him to format/initialize the disk and he of course said "ok."  I had Time Machine set to use my OLD external USB drive and it's been working great. As of this writing, my coworker is a happy camper. I, however, am not.  I'm not blaming Time Machine, just noting the differences between my coworker's experience and my own. Since the volume is not currently mounted on my machine, I can't format my disk the same way as my coworker has done using Time Machine, since Time Machine doesn't see the volume.
My fear is that the manufacturer (whom I've also contacted and am awaiting their response) will throw this back to a software problem....and the folks on the forum here will point their fingers and say 'hardware problem.'  Ah, the eternal struggle.....who to blame?
Any help or additional troubleshooting tips are greatly appreciated.

This is the best, and only, way to format an external hard drive, which is courtesy of Kappy.
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process will take 30 minutes to an hour or more depending upon the drive size.
Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

No application runs after booting from an external (USB) drive

Hi all,
my best hope is that I just embarrass myself with a blatantly obvious question instead of finding a real issue that will be resolved only in later updates. Here it is:
As I want to upgrade my hard drive in my good ol' MacBook, I wanted to backup my present boot HDD to an external USB drive (freshly formatted, HFS+ journaled, GUID partition table). I tried both SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner. In both cases, the backup/cloning process goes fine, and I can reboot into the external drive, and the OS starts (yes, with wifi working, even iStat menus, textExpander etc. initiating fine). But all applications (not those on the menu bar, though) crash and notify me of some thread having tried some invalid operation, or sometimes I even got some vague reference to kernel protection.
Do you have any ideas what this is? Something new and (supposedly) secure in 10.5.6? I tried a fairly standard procedure, I think. (Also, it is a fairly pressing issue as I would not really want to waste much more time on this drive swap. And I would rather use disk-cloning than the install disk and sucking back data from an apparently unreliable backup.)
Many thanks for any thoughts!
(Just to inform the interested, I ran a fairly extensive cleaning-maintenance-rebuild cycle by the latest Onyx before starting all this, this should clean up the state of the OS pretty much. But I could not run DiskWarrior. Convince me if you think that this would solve the problem.)

Thanks Devin, I think my issue is a bit different.
I am 'long' past the 10.5.6 update (as long as possible), it did not crash, and Software Update checked what it wanted several times since then (as it is set to do so daily).
Thanks for the safe boot tip, I have not tried it yet, though I am skeptical why would this help applications starting up without breaking some kernel protection -- but only if I booted up from an external drive.
I repaired all I could before the cloning of the drive, only the deep maintenance of DiskWarrior was skipped. With the disk or the OS itself, I basically did what you can, even the stuff that you are rarely supposed to do. (Onyx is a great tool to do all these and more, freely.)
I am not sure either that a FireWire drive would have helped, but who knows. (But really, the OS would boot, just the applications would feel that their are on an 'inferior' drive?) In any case, FireWire drives are not that easy to come by, and a risky investment -- e.g. I could not use them with the new MacBooks. Oh, and all my work was done on a firm table, but again, the behavior would be hard to explain as the HDD misbehaving, as the OS had no glitch, just I could not start applications without their crashing immediately.
Thanks again, I hope I run into something useful or if it is a bug then Apple magically pushes out some update before their winter break, or I will sadly watch my precious new drive sitting on a table idly.

I have a first generation apple tv synced to a itunes library on an external USB drive. Movies and Music Won't Play

Here's my setup. First Generation Apple TV. G4 Powermac running OS X 10.5.8 iTunes 10 with the Library stored on an External 3 Terabyte USB 2 drive. It's plugged into a PCI USB 2 card. Everything worked fine till I transferred my iTunes library to the external USB drive. Things seem to sync up fine. I have it set to copy TV shows to the Apple TV's internal drive and that seems to work but when I try to play music or movies that are streaming from the library, I get an error. With movies I get the "The selected video cannot be played. The format was not recognized." error. The movie and music list seems up to date but now it won't play. Did I waste my money on this external drive? How do I get this setup to work?

I don't think this will be a complete answer to your question, but may point you in the right direction.
I have a similar setup (same OS X and iTunes versions), but my library is on a network attached 2TB harddrive (vs a USB 2 drive). Mine works fine, both syncing (which you don't have a problem with) and streaming. It's possible that iTunes doesn't like the USB 2 drive, but I don't know. Are you able to watch TV shows on your PowerMac after having moved the files to the USB drive? If you can watch content on your laptop but not on your AppleTV, it suggests the Apple TV doesn't like the USB drive.
Perhaps you didn't transfer iTunes library content correctly. (Forgive me if I'm telling you things you already know.) The iTunes library consists of a list of content and it's location (local harddrive, network drive, etc.). If you simply moved the files, but didn't actually update the library with the new locations, this can explain why you can't stream the content. The Apple TV displays what is in the library, but cannot play it if the library entry is pointing to the wrong location. Note: This "library update" I'm referring to is not the same as simply changing the iTunes media folder location in iTunes > Preferences > Advanced.
When I moved my content to an external drive, I had to delete everything in my iTunes Library, then re-import everything (File > Add to library). Don't let the phrase "delete everything in my iTunes library" freak you out. Deleting entries in the library is not the same as deleting the files (which you definitely do NOT want to do).
If you select an item in your iTunes library and press the Delete button, it asks for confirmation thus:
Are you sure you want to delete the selected TV show from your iTunes library?
It's OK to answer "Delete TV Show". It will then ask you if you want to delete the file. Do NOT delete the file. You can select your entire library and delete everything at once, just make sure you do NOT delete the files when it asks. When that is done, make sure the iTunes Media Folder Location is set to where you want and that the files are there. Then, go to File, Add to Library and re-import everything. It will take several minutes to more than an hour, depending on the speed of your computer and the size of your library.
I have had to do this everytime I've moved my library to different storage devices. If there is a simpler way, I am not aware of it.
I hope this helps.

How to recover after performing an 'Erase' and then 'Partition' within Disk Utility of an External USB drive?

Hi - I accidently ran an 'Erase' and then 'Partition' within Disk Utility of an External USB drive (meant to run it against another drive that was plugged in). Does anyone have any suggestions on if it is possible to recover from this? It has all my family photos on it and my backup is a few months old :-(
I tried running Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery but it found what looks like basic mac folder structure (probably from the first erase). I think what messed me up was that I rain the repartition which formats the drive a 2nd time! Any help is truly appreciated!
thank you,
-Steve

Hello RalphR_MI,
Take a look at this page, which lists several articles. Please let me know if any of these help you restore your backup.
Also, take a look at this article, as well as this one.
I hope this helps. I'm not sure of a few things, so I'm sorry for sending you so much, but I'm confident it will give you something new to try.
Please let me know if this helps. Good luck!
↙-----------How do I give Kudos?| How do I mark a post as Solved? ----------------↓

I would like to recover my bookmarks from my old hard drive that I now have as an external USB drive. The old OS was Vista; the new is Windows 7.

I recently had a new hard drive installed on my laptop; this hard drive has the Windows 7 OS on it.
At the same time, I had my old hard drive mounted in an SATB enclosure so that I could use it as an external USB drive. [I stupidly did not export my bookmarks before doing all of this]
Everything seems to work fine [I can see all of the files], but I cannot find out where my bookmarks are stored on the old hard drive.
Is it possible to find them and get them transferred over to the new hard drive??
Thanks!!

Bookmarks are stored in a file called places.sqlite inside the profile folder. You can copy that file from the old profile folder into your current profile folder. For details of how to find the profile folder see https://support.mozilla.com/kb/Profiles or http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
You can recover more than just the bookmarks - https://support.mozilla.com/kb/Recovering+important+data+from+an+old+profile

My external USB drive is not recognized by Win XP

Hi!
I have an external USB drive that is HTF+ formatted. It is not recognized by Windows XP. If I start the windows disk manager it gives me the option to initialize the drive. Do I dare to do this? Will it not erase the information on the drive?
Thanks for any help!
/ Anders

Hi Anders and welcome to Discussions,
I have an external USB drive that is HTF+ formatted. It is not recognized by Windows XP. If I start the windows disk manager it gives me the option to initialize the drive. Do I dare to do this? Will it not erase the information on the drive?
Yes it will !!
Although with the BootCamp 3.0 Drivers (from the OSX Snow Leopard DVD) and the 3.1 Driver update (downloadable) Apple has introduced read-access to HFS+ partitions from Windows this feature seems to have some serious problems for some people.
Personally I see this feature as "experimental" at the moment.
XP itself knows nothing and therefor can not use/see HFS+ partitions and GPT (GUID partition table) harddisks.
You might wanna have a look (or buy) at MacDrive http://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/ which right now is the better solution.
Thanks for any help!
/ Anders
Hope it helps
Stefan

Single-user mode: How to mount and access an external USB drive?

My MacBook Pro HD is acting up. Cannot boot normally or into "safe mode". Cannot reinstall OS without wiping out the HD. Need to recover some critical files but DiskUtil First Aid and Restore options cannot successfully complete. Problem traced down to "invalid node structure" which means I either have a hardware problem or my filesystem partition directory structure is corrupted. I need to recover some files that are not backed up (timin issue with my regular backup process).
I can boot into single-user mode, mount the root file system (/sbin/mount -uw /) and can see/navigate the rot filesystem structure via good UNIX command line. Here's what I would like to do (in single-user mode):
1. Mount an external USB drive (250 GB already formatted as Mac OS X Extended)
2. Copy various files and/or directories from my HD to the external USB drive (UNIX cp command)
I realize I could go spend $$ for the Disk Warrior or Data Rescue products (or something similar) that SHOULD help me recover my HD or files, but it seems silly to do this when I can see, touch and taste them from within single-user mode....
Comments? Suggestions?
TIA --
Trent
P.S. Once I've recovered my files, I'll try to reformat the HD and then reinstall the OS. And THEN go have Apple look at my machine (thank goodness for AppleCare coverage)!

Resolution:
1) Boot system in single-user mode (SUM) with external HD attached.
2) Execute the following UNIX CLI commands once SUM boot process is completed:
# fsck -fy
# mount -uw /
# mkdir /Volumes/target_directory
# mount -t hfs -w /dev/diskXXX /Volumes/target_directory
# cp -RXv /source_directory /Volumes/target_directory
Where XXX is the device-level name for your external HD's data partition. In my case this was /dev/disk1s2. It may take some experimentation to identify this device name if your system has multiple HD's.
3) Verify contents were successfully copied onto the /Volumes/target_directory.
Comments and observations:
- Do NOT use "/" as your source directory - cp will make a second (redundant) copy of /volumes/target_directory
- I was able to successfully copy ALL files off my HD despite the fsck command's "invalid node structure" error message with this simple procedure. YMMV, depending on the state of your HD.
- The repeated disk0s2: I/O error warnings displayed during the SUM boot process did not seem to have a negative effect on this procedure. I also received this same error warning intermittently as I navigated the mounted filesystem did not seem to be a problem, either. Again, YMMV.
Commercial software:
I downloaded ProSoft Engineering's Data Rescue 3 product (trial version) before spending $99 to attempt to recover my "bad" HD's data via mounting to a good system with FW target mode. It could not successfully complete its "QuickScan" process and immediately hung on block 0 of 390M during its "Deep Scan" process. The product did seem to function properly on an operational system. ProSoft's technical support was responsive and helpful but had no answer for my "Deep Scan" error.
I did not attempt to use Alsoft's Disk Warrior 4 product. I could not find any trial software available and was reluctant to spend $100 based upon the mixed reviews and comments on this discussion forum as well as other reviews. Alsoft does claim to address the "invalid node structure" error in their marketing materials. Hindsight being 20/20 - I saved $100 by using this simple procedure.
Final note:
Neither Leopard nor Snow Leopard's installation DVD could recognize the bad internal HD when trying to do a reinstall. While DiskUtil was able to "see" the bad internal drive it immediately failed when I tried to do an "erase and format". Took the system to my local Apple store and the Genius ran a tool called "SMART Utility" from Volitans Software (www.volitans-software.com). SMART utility confirmed that my HD was bad so it was replaced. AppleCare pays for itself (once again!).

Is it possible to use an external hard drive for time machine backup and also as a regular hard drive?

Is it possible to use an external hard drive for time machine backup and also as a regular hard drive?

I am using an external drive in the exact way that you described. You just keep it plugged in to the computer when you want to access the movies and files. In order to put files on it, just go to finder open up the drive under devices and drag and drop files onto the drive. It is just like using a usb drive with a terabyte of space.

Can I boot Vista OS from an external USB drive

Hi, I would like to install Vista onto an external (USB) drive and boot from that occasionally whilst retaining XP on the internal drive. Is this possible please. I realise I would need to change the boot order in BIOS.
I know I could create a dual boot internal but would like to retain as much space as possible on the internal drive as I will only rarely need to use the dreaded Vista.
Thanks
Ron

And how you want to install Vista on USB device? Have you already tried it?
Please post a little bit about your experience with it if you have some.
Anyway, as far as I know something like this is not possible.

Is it possible to format an external USB drive with XFS or EXT3 ?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for