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NTLDRismissing.com
7th February 2006, 08:57 AM
What if we tried to boot the operating system from outside of the box? From a floppy, cd-rom, usb memory stick, etc; that might eliminate a lot of the difficulties in getting the initial hardware to find the NTFS or FAT partition that XP resides on.

I say that, but I'm really unsure if Mac's allow for outside devices to boot, and if those devices could then "see" the internal drive.

Of course xp will need to continue to work on the platform which is a whole other problem, I just figured I would throw that out there.
sud0n1m
7th February 2006, 02:27 PM
What if we tried to boot the operating system from outside of the box? From a floppy, cd-rom, usb memory stick, etc; that might eliminate a lot of the difficulties in getting the initial hardware to find the NTFS or FAT partition that XP resides on.

I say that, but I'm really unsure if Mac's allow for outside devices to boot, and if those devices could then "see" the internal drive.

Of course xp will need to continue to work on the platform which is a whole other problem, I just figured I would throw that out there.

This is a great idea - I have discussed it with a few people. It seems that if you install Windows XP / Vista onto an external drive on a PC and then try to boot that same harddrive on the Intel Mac, it wont boot. It seems that something still needs to be loaded in between to allow this to happen, whether it is some kind of bootloader to interface between EFI and the Windows XP installation or a modification to the EFI itself.

Keep em coming!
Colin
thatswhatithought
17th February 2006, 11:58 PM
There is no way your going to boot XP off of USB (and probrobly firewire) external devices. Halfway through the boot sequence Windows XP clears and initializes the entire USB subsystem, which would kill the boot device, and kill Windows effectively.

My idea is to try Windows XP embedded... theres a 180 day free trial at microsoft. You can make a custom XP that doesnt initilize the USB bus OR EVEN BETTER you could change all the bios calls and make them efi compatible...

good luck im cheering for all of you!

WINDOWS XP EMBEDDED: http://msdn.microsoft.com/embedded/windowsxpembedded/default.aspx