Boot from external USB2-HD

Guys, it's hard to quite understand what you're trying to accomplish and how you actually went through the mentioned unsuccessful tries. Why don't you provide a really technical info, as opposed to emotional shortcuts? Here is some input for you, that I believe may be useful.

First off, your BIOS should be aware that the external (USB 1.1 or 2.0) drive is eligible for booting. With your i8500 laptops this seems to be the case. Not so with many other machines, in particular with my i5100. For such the machines, you'd need to force the BIOS to update the so called ESCD (Extended Storage Communication Data) area, if the BIOS supports such the update! I tried this type of update for my both desktop (Compaq Evo x4000) and laptop (Dell Inspiron 5100) machines (to allow booting from a USB 1.1 thumb drive) but to no avail. Many people reported a success but they used different machines. Here is the idea behind such the update - in the case you'll need it.

Some motherboards allow feature "Force ESCD Update" right in the BIOS menu - an easy way to go. Most PCs made by major manufacturers (Dell, HP, Gateway), however, do not automatically provide this feature and even may not provide it at all. Usually, you don't know for sure until actually try yourself. Normally, BIOS automatically updates the ESCD only for newly connected hard disks and CD-ROMs on usual interfaces - IDE or SCSI, not the USB one. To force such an update, you'd need to physically disconnect all such the already present devices (so that the BIOS cannot find any boot device) and connect external (USB) devices. When you power the system up now, the BIOS is forced to update the ESCD and recognize these new devices as eligible for booting. When it prompts to restart the system, you may allow this (if the external devices don't have a boot record at this time, the PC just hangs which is no big deal) or power it down and reconnect the previously removed disk and CD drives. Needless to say, you'd have to additionally instruct the BIOS to include these new external devices at some place in its boot sequence. I assume, you've done this.

Now, when you try to boot from an external USB device, the BIOS provides drivers to access it (just like it does for booting from floppy). These are the USB 1.1, not 2.0, drivers. I doubt, and at least never heard of, that any today's BIOS provides USB2 drivers. In other words, you cannot hope to have a speedy USB boot, like you'd have with a IDE or SCSI interface. When you try to boot into a modern OS from an external USB (yes, it is USB2 drive but the USB2 drivers are provided by the Operating System, not by the BIOS!) device, not only you may not have all the luxury of the IDE/SCSI boot, but also you accept the assumption the modern OS is capable of that easily booting from such the slow interface. Yet, the BIOS USB 1.1 drivers are known to be very primitive. Such the assumption is too strong!

In other words, the BIOS driver's boot support is aimed at some simple OS to boot to. Normally, it is some flavor of DOS, not Windows XP and even Windows 9x! And booting to DOS is quite sufficient for many maintanence tasks which I personally heavily use when booting from floppy (NOTE: For the USB 1.1 drivers provided by BIOS, there is no difference in speed between a floppy or hard disk!). For instance, here is how I backup my (the only possible) hard disk in the i5100 machine.

I boot via USB floppy to DR-DOS or MS-DOS with PowerQuest Partition Magic and Drive Image applications. With a DOS boot, the modern versions of Drive Image allow to write images to hard disk (thus, I'd need to repartition my HD, and I do it in advance, maybe with preceeding conversion of the NTFS into FAT32) or CD-ROM. Both ways work for me. The latest version 7 of the DI allows to write images to external devices (USB or FireWire), even network drives. But it is run under Windows XP or 9x, which is not our case.

You, however, try to use a USB(2.0) hard disk to boot from with the same luxury as you get with a SCSI/IDE disk. How can you get this?! Who is going to provide the sophisticated USB(2.0) drivers for it? BIOS can't do it. Of course, what first comes to our mind is to allow the Windows, at some moment during its boot, to unload "real mode" BIOS drivers and load fresh its own USB 2.0 drivers - similar to how it works with Windows 9x DOS/Windows double boot. But this hardly is possible at all - firstly because the BIOS drivers are too primitive for the purpose. Yet, the OS has to be aware (that is written in this manner) about such the driver swap. Maybe in the future but not today...

You tried to copy a working bootable (Windows XP, ha?) partition on a (EIDE) hard disk, thereafter connect it as an external USB drive. Now, you say it boots part way. Well, how can you imagine it boots successfully to the very end?! Just think about what you'd see in the Device Manager. When HD is connected to IDE interface, the Device Manager shows to you this type of connection with the appropriate driver support. However, when you connect this same HD to a USB interface, what changes in the Registry? Nothing! How do you imagine Windows driver support for this HD if so?! I even do not mention the drive letter assignment which you can change (under WXP) for many but not the boot and Windows host partition.

The only possible approach seems to me is to try to install from scratch the Windows (XP) on a USB HD, not to copy a bootable from IDE interface partition. I've never heard about such tries and at all doubt its practical usefulness. At least for the maintanence or backup tasks this is not needed. But you could try nonetheless. And please report on the results, even unsuccessful!

I tried to give you, guys, some technical input that hopefully can save your time and efforts by means of narrowing down the directions of your searches. If I'm overkilling things or writing too much, please excuse me: you'll read this only one time.

Good luck in your efforts! But try to forsee what is possible and what is not.