i recently purchased a 160gb external hard drive for my PC. at the moment me and my sister share this PC on windows XP, we dont log on, we simply just use folders to divide our stuff up.

now that i have this extra hard drive, is there anyway i can use it to install XP onto it, and have it for my own personal use, so that it uses the sound & graphics card, motherboard and processor from the original PC??

I don't quite understand what your after but this is what I expect:

You and your sister use the computer seperately, but you want to install windows xp on the external hard drive so you can unplug it when your not using it and take it with you.

When your external hard drive is unplugged, the computer will run from the normal hard drive inside the pc, am I right?

If this is the case, then yes it can be done, but you will need to set your external hard drive to primary master, reinstall windows xp, including all drivers, with the other hard drive disabled in the BIOS.

When you unplug your USB hard drive, you will then need to change the settings back in the BIOs so the computer knows to boot from the original hard drive inside your puter.

If this is not the answer you are looking for can you please be more specific. Thanks.

Why? If you already have XP on the PC why on earth would you want to install it again? Just add user profiles to the current operating system and store all your data on your new external drive.

no u cant simple answer. u can have 2000 or 98 as the second os. but 2 xp is a no no its doesnt understand and it just wastes space.

Smee

you'd have to swap the drives.

So effectively the computer would only know about the one drive installed at all times. (Either the internal or external)

Ian is right with want i wanted to do.

Wimmy, good point about simply using the HD for storgae,

its really because she downloads lots of crap and cloggs up the PC. so i wanted to use the new HD for my own personal use (its mainly for MP3's) but i wanted to have my own half of the pc. when it comes to splitting a pc into two users i simply dont get it.

thanks for the help so far, any solutions to what i should do that is easy to setup and manage?

In that case.

Open Control Panel, and click on Users.

It's pretty straight forward from there onwards.

I'm assuming your External hard drive is either USB or Firewire, then it'll be plug and play. Like Wimmy suggested, simply use your external hard drive for storage use for your files (MP3's, porn, etc) so plug it in when your at the computer and unplug when not there, simple.
Xp will pick it up and show it as another hard drive under "My computer"

When you create a new user under XP, you will be presented with a log-in screen. Like I said, it's straightforward, but if not, just let us know.

if u want u can set up a switch so it only allows power to one hard drive depending on whos u want to run. not to sure how u wouls achieve this as both would have to be on master slots on ide cables before powering up either one and if u got a dvd burner that also is on a master line.

i got a raid pci card to add another 2 ide cables but end of day not worth the hassle

Smee

You can have a dual boot operating system and thus run two Windows XP or in fact whatever OS you want.

But thats probably not what you want todo in this situation!

When I say users, I mean user accounts by the way.

Setup 2 user accounts. I have this on my P.C at home.
I am also On call at work so I have 4 accounts setup.
One for Me, the missus, the sprog and one for my works on-call settings.
That way each account doesn't get too clogged up with other people crapola.

thanks for all the ideas guys, i think im going to have a look into splitting via the control panel under users. then we can both have our seperate log ons, and still share most programs.