Installing XP on External Hard Drive

[bigbanana]

I've only ever had one OS on my PC, but now a friend has asked me to do something on his PC and I'm confused where to start.

Basically, he has a PC running XP as the OS. The installation itself is OK but there's a lot of junk on it and he'd like to format the drive.

He has an external hard drive attached to the PC via USB and he'd like to install XP onto that drive He then wants to format the PC HDD and put W98 onto that.

The problem we've got is that the once the XP disc is inserted in the PC drive, it seems to want to do things to the PC installation of XP.

What we want is a method of telling the PC to install the XP to the external HDD leaving the PC version alone.
I thought that entering the drive letter of the external HDD and putting X:/Setup in the Run box might work, but it doesn't.

It's been such a long time since I installed XP in my own PC, I can't remember if an option like this is given during the setup installation - without knowing for certain, I don't want to risk it. To make matters worse, the setup screens I've seen on the web do show that XP asks about partitions during installation. Now I've always thought that partitions were on the same drive, but could the disc include referring to another HDD in this way?

Many thanks for all the help you can give.

[markysngc]

AC, thanks for pointing out my error, I do recall that now , been a long time since had anything to do with98, and back then if anyone had a drive over 32gb they were *********** very lucky and seriously rich:) oh how times have changed!!

the limit is weird but I seem to recall some book or something saying it was limited in later NT based windows systems to encourage people to use NTFS

by jogging my memory you have helped me out with a problem of formatting a 500gb usb drive so it is easily readable on all windows and linux machine, so ta again

Mark