External HDD and Testing OS

[Zatara214]

I ordered an 80 GB external hard drive to put in my enclosure I got a while back (it's IDE and USB 2.0 but its still quick), and so I thought I'd test out a few OS distros on it.

I figure I'll make it a democratic decision (quick, everyone play 4chan?), and have you guys choose which OS you want to test on the NP8660. This way, everyone gets to test an OS, and I'm not miserable trying to keep my data lol.

I couldn't figure out how to get any Windows installations to work from a USB hard drive, if anyone thinks they can do it feel free to tell me how.

As I'm testing, I'll be sure to notify everyone of anything I had to do to get things running (driver installs, issues, etc)

First up?

[snip931]

I ordered an 80 GB external hard drive to put in my enclosure I got a while back (it's IDE and USB 2.0 but its still quick), and so I thought I'd test out a few OS distros on it.

I figure I'll make it a democratic decision (quick, everyone play 4chan?), and have you guys choose which OS you want to test on the NP8660. This way, everyone gets to test an OS, and I'm not miserable trying to keep my data lol.

I couldn't figure out how to get any Windows installations to work from a USB hard drive, if anyone thinks they can do it feel free to tell me how.

As I'm testing, I'll be sure to notify everyone of anything I had to do to get things running (driver installs, issues, etc)

First up?

Ive never done this myself but i remember seeing this in bios. cant you set a USB device as the 1st priority in the boot sequence?

[Zatara214]

Ive never done this myself but i remember seeing this in bios. cant you set a USB device as the 1st priority in the boot sequence?

Talking about Windows? Yes, that's how I boot everything. The issue with Windows is that, during boot, it disables all USB devices, which..... well it disables the external drive, which is problematic if you know what I mean. It WILL install, it just won't boot the first time. And I don't know of any way of fixing that. Linux distros seem to work fine on them, though.

[Woody]

Have you ever used Microsoft Virtual PC? It's free and it will create a virtual environment you can use to test just about anything. The nice thing is that you can run it in a window while using your existing setup. It's very fast but has some hardware limitations. For example it can't fully access all your hardware directly so graphics apps are very limited. But it's great because if you get a virus it's contained in the virtual environment allowing you to play around with it but without any possibility of it affecting your system. It should work from a USB drive.

Also, the more RAM you have the more environments you can run simultaneously. If you set your virtual environment to 1GB you can run a couple of them together on a 4GB computer. And you can have as many environments in standby or hibernation as you want. So for example you could install Virtual PC once on your system but create as many environments as you want so you can test a bunch of different OS configurations simultaneously.

Another thing. While Microsoft allows you to run demo copies of it's Windows operating system without a license keep in mind that you are still obligated under any legal software requirements for multiple installations as if they were a separate physical PC. I don't agree with this logic but it's the way Microsoft and their lawyers see it.

[Zatara214]

Have you ever used Microsoft Virtual PC? It's free and it will create a virtual environment you can use to test just about anything. The nice thing is that you can run it in a window while using your existing setup. It's very fast but has some hardware limitations. For example it can't fully access all your hardware directly so graphics apps are very limited. But it's great because if you get a virus it's contained in the virtual environment allowing you to play around with it but without any possibility of it affecting your system. It should work from a USB drive.

Also, the more RAM you have the more environments you can run simultaneously. If you set your virtual environment to 1GB you can run a couple of them together on a 4GB computer. And you can have as many environments in standby or hibernation as you want. So for example you could install Virtual PC once on your system but create as many environments as you want so you can test a bunch of different OS configurations simultaneously.

Another thing. While Microsoft allows you to run demo copies of it's Windows operating system without a license keep in mind that you are still obligated under any legal software requirements for multiple installations as if they were a separate physical PC. I don't agree with this logic but it's the way Microsoft and their lawyers see it.
Well I've never used Virtual PC, but I do have my own copy of VMWare which I use. The only thing with that is, as you said, it can't access the hardware directly, and so for testing purposes it kind of defeats the purpose. Thx for that though, is VPC better than VMWare?

[Woody]

I'm not sure which is better. I don't have any experience with VMWare. VPC is free from Microsoft and it works great. I have three testing environments on my desktop that I use for various things like checking questionable executables for viruses etc. Although the virtual environments are only single core, the app itself works nicely across multiple cores so you can run several virtual PCs simultaneously and fast on a multi core system.

Obviously the applications are limited and specialized but for certain purposes it's an incredibly valuable tool.

VPC was bought out from a company that made it to allow X86 OS to run on old Macintoshes (Big surprise MS bought it eh?). It is extremely easy to set up and use and completely self explanatory.