thanx for ur reply.

if i were to have a separate internal hard drive with windows installed on it, and if i had constant access to it, i would be able to switch from the installed hard drive to the seperate one using the same data cable and i would be able to achieve the result i am looking for.
i thought with todays technology this would have been possible using a usb hard drive in place of the separate hard drive in the example above.

if ive got this wrong, then please excuse me. i often try to achieve the impossible without success.

the idea is to only copy files such as photos, music, word documents etc. in the above example this would be possibe as i have a computer set up like this which is why i know. im just eager to know whether this can be done on a usb hard drive.

as i say, if my idea is wrong, then sorry for wasting your time.

thanx

>if i were to have a separate internal hard drive with windows installed on it, and if i had constant access to it, i would be able to switch from the installed hard drive to the seperate one using the same data cable and i would be able to achieve the result i am looking for.

No because you would have to reboot each time for the different drives/partitions

>i thought with todays technology this would have been possible using a usb hard drive in place of the separate hard drive in the example above.

You can boot from USB devices but the answer is still the same

>the idea is to only copy files such as photos, music, word documents etc.

which is a totally different proposition. For this any external (or internal) disk, memory stick etc works fine but we'll call it a data storage device.

i think you think that the copying of files from one hard drive to the other is important. its not. i could easily do that with a memory stick. if i had to reboot when changing to the other hard drive, that would not be a problem either as it would very seldom i would need to.

when u say i can boot from a usb hard drive, this is sounding more like what im looking for. do u mean i can install xp on my usb hard drive with the drivers for the things i want to run on the usb hard drive and when i boot up my pc from then on i will be using the usb hard drive and will only use the internal one after changing (maybe) the settings in the bios and rebooting.

have i got this right.

thanx

You can boot from an external USB drive, tricky to set up but Google - "Booting from USB devices" . This will be slow in performance because the loaded XP's pagefile will have to use the USB port.

Better idea get another SATA hard disk, install in your PC, install XP. On boot select which hard disk from which you wish to boot.

(Thinks? does one XP code cover this?)