quick question on using another hard drive

[johnr100]

in textbooks guide on flashing the 360 i said you could your internal hard drive burn a cd of ntfsdos boot off that and select your hard drive could i use an external drive instead of the c drive?

[CoFree]

man
i dont know.your "c" drive is in your computer
if you tried to save the info to a external drive by usb (i would think)
im not sure the drivers would load right.
man
i just dont know.
sadalius will have more on this than I.

[Sesshomaru]

A lot of external HDD's are preformatted to FAT or FAT32, it is definitely better to format external HDD's to NTFS (with Windows) to get around the 4GB single file limit of FAT partitions. The issue probably wouldn't be booting from the external, but whether or not the drivers necessary for flashing the 360 would work from an external like CoFree said. Setting your PC to boot from an external HDD should be a simple matter of configuring your bios to boot from an external device and having a bootable image somewhere on the external HDD. Whether or not you will be able to flash your 360 from an external HDD with the NTFS4DOS method is another story.

[sadalius]

Yes, you could setup an external hard drive for this or an internal one for that matter, just like you would a USB stick. But like sesshomaru was talking about the file size limitation, what I would do with an external one would be similar to how you would setup an internal. In either case, an NTFS4DOS cd would not be required.

Here is how I would set them up:

External HDD:
1. Create 2 partitions. One thats about 200 MB or a little larger if you wish, you could probably install windows 98 if you wanted to create a partition large enough to hold it, but 200 MB would be plenty large enough. The rest could be partitioned any how you would like to use it.

2. Format the 200 MB partition and make it bootable. There are a couple of ways to do this. Installing MS-DOS, or booting from a windows 98 boot floppy or CD and format the partition with the DOS command of "format x: /s" command will also work, just have to substitue the X with the actual drive letter. The /s will tell the format to make a system drive out of it and will make it bootable.

3. Run iprep and choose that drive to be what you want iprep to use. You won't be able to check the box that says format and make bootable though. iprep will create a folder on the partition with the files in it. Just move the files out of the folder and into the root of the partition.

4. Boot into your BIOS and make sure that its set to boot from a USB device and let it do so. Run iprep as normal.

Doing this on an internal hdd would be almost identical, except you would need to setup a dual boot scenario. After creating your two partitions, install dos on the small partition, then install windows on the other. Windows should see the DOS partition and allow for the system to dual boot. After finishing the XP install, you should have to choose which you want to boot. If it doesn't, you'll probably have to install Acronis OS selector and switch operating systems that way. Setting up iprep would be the same as for an external hdd.

You can use NTFS4DOS if you wanted to though. I just don't see the need for it unless nothing else is working.

Any which way, if you undertake doing it one of these ways, it will take some time and patience to get it setup. I have mine setup on an internal HDD with acronis OS selector. It took me about 2 hours to get everything setup the way that I wanted it to be. The majority of that time was installing XP though.

If you need more info, just let me know and I'll try my best to get it for you.