The operating system does not have drivers that will allow that at boot time. Windows 2000 and higher cannot be booted directly from anything USB. This is from my experience a few years ago of trying to do pretty much this same thing. I'm afraid I have bad news and good news.
#How to make a usb drive bootable in win xp how to#
Or if any of you know how to set this up, I'd appreciate your help with that, too. If anyone has a link to an article on how to get this set up, I'd really appreciate it. I've been googling my ass off looking for a solution for about 3 hours. However, the system hangs at during the boot sequence and will not proceed into Win XP. I have the Win XP HDD connected via SATA to USB 3.0 adapter. They require physical devices.Ī first effort has been made to set BIOS to boot to USB first. However, some of our sensors and control systems that depend on Win XP will not communicate with my laptop when the virtual XP OS is running because the tooling cannot communicate with virtual Ethernet devices. My first attempt to get around this was creating a virtual machine of Win XP in my Windows 8 OS using Hyper-V. I need to be able to use that HDD to boot into the OS on that HDD to make use of the legacy software to manage our older tools. I have my old HDD that came from my old company issued laptop. I need Windows 8 to use our current enterprise software as well as the latest versions of CAD software. Some of our tooling uses old software that will not run on Windows 8.