usb boot is a no go
Thanks for you advice about trying to use a usb hard drive to boot windows xp and / or windows vista.
With dixml I copied a windows xp install to p1 of my usb hard drive.
I tried to boot off this partition and could not xp to boot.
It of course tried, but gave big screen with like a 000007F error.
Then the next attempt went to the screen that asks if you want to boot to safe mode, etc. Ofcourse I still could not boot.
So if I want to test recoverability of my system I need a sata laptop drive that I can restore to as a usb drive then after a bcd fix of the GUID's (and who knows what else) on this drive, I could mount it internally and attempt to boot.
Right now I do have confidance that dixml could / would handle a restore to my existing internal laptop drive after I mounted it as a usb external on another computer and ran the restore there. I could then mount my original drive in my original computer and boot ok (probably). However who knows what microsoft would detect if anything changed hardware wise due to breakage. I know now a different physical internal drive would likely not boot due to microsoft's booting logic. Also I likely could not mount my exiting harddrive on someone else's laptop and do a boot.
I don't think they realize the mess they are getting into.
Thanks again
