Things become somewhat more complex if the broke hard drive is inside a laptop, the same the case with my hard drive failure. In essence, installing of Windows XP to the external hard drive is achievable, yet you still encounter the serious problem of temporary files put to the corrupted main hard drive throughout the installation process. In a few cases, you are able to prevent this by disactivating the IDE controller, which is the controller employed by the motherboard to allow entry to the hard drive, in your laptop BIOS. In my case, disabling the IDE controller in the BIOS stage also make the CD drive malfunctioning, making it impractical to Copy files off of the installation CD so to install Windows XP on the external hard drive. I am deliberately excluding alternatives like network installation and ghosting, since a lot of home users will not have a simple measures to pull these off and still have Windows XP to boot up without running into different troubles.There's a workaround for inadequate laptop hard drive installation alternatives. Rather than attempting to boot up from a hard drive, boot up from the CD with the entire the tools you require already installed. As part of the recovery procedure, I made the bootable CD with BartPE, which utilises a certain core Windows components and packages of data recovery softwares. BartPE provides all things from the CD drive, just like a Linux based Knoppix OS. BartPE needs files admitted on both a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 installation CD, which produces a micro- OS unexpired for 24-hours to perform diagnostic retrieval of lost data. The operating system completely boots at the 24-hour mark, it this is by no means a lasting fix. Even so, 24-hours is a lot of time period to rectify any laptop hard drive failure. If I did not get BartPE, I am not certain what I'd have practiced to recover my files back from the damaged laptop hard disk.
