Operating system on external hard drive

Jazzy_B

The hard drive on my old PC has died, and my kids are mourning the loss of games that they played on ME and can't play on XP. We've tried the compatibility wizard , but still several games are unplayable on XP. I don't really have the space for 2 desktops.
I was wondering if it was possible to install ME and the old games on an external drive,and boot the XP computer from it.If it was possible, what would I change the boot device to?
Any advice much appreciated.

culpepper

Some of my old games are on a zip disk which is formatted as fat32 I think while the rest of the pc is xp.The games run from the disk but not if I move them to my xp drive so it might be possible.I dont boot from the zip disk however,I just run the zip drive as I would a cd drive and click the exe of the game to run.

blinky

Some of the more recent BIOSes allow booting from USB devices, so in theory you should be able to boot from an external USB HD drive. It may be possible to boot from a Firewire HD as well (less sure about that). Often recent BIOSes have a Boot Menu option when starting up, otherwise it's a case of going into the BIOS to change the boot drive or hacking XP boot menu.

If the C: drive is formatted as FAT32 then you could
put an additional HD in / install WinME/98 on a differerent partition and use the following procedure http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/windowsxp/articles/515/1/Install-Windows-98-after-XP

blinky

What are the games you are having problems with.

Jazzy_B

blinky wrote:

What are the games you are having problems with.

The one they miss the most is Babyz , followed by Frogger.Ubisoft don'tseem to be interested in issuing a patch, even though you can still buy the game. The onlijne versions of Frogger are full of ads and spyware.