Windows Vista Booting through external hard disk

I have a Dell Inspiron 1525 model (bought on April last year), preinstalled with Windows Vista Home Basic. I want to boot Windows XP from an external hard disk ( WD 250 GB) that I bought only yesterday. Can somebody give me some idea as to how to begin (since am new to this OS installations)? Have been going through lot of forums but got it in an abstract way.

 

Okies...

1)Does that BIOS screen already show an "external hdd" option or it becomes active if external hdd is connected before the booting starts?

[Anyway will go home and find it ....]


2) If it doesn't show is there a way out to achieve the task or my money for the said purpose goes in vain?


The scenario is I am to undergo a tool training that is tested on XP machines. So not sure if I would be able to run it on Vista. On surfing internet, got to know about this possibiliy of booting other OS through ext. hdd but in a vague way with too much of experimentation details.
So want to be a little sure of what to expect and what not to ?

 

Another option is to install XP in virtual machine.

Download & install Oracle VM VirtualBox from oracle.com and you can install XP in it.

 

Thanks PeteC and rsinfo...

Will explore a bit about these and let you know of any concern.

 

PeteC...


Done with the dual booting . Learnt a lot of things while doing.

Current status: Windows XP installed without the drivers...

Have my drivers in the external hard disk. While trying to install anyone of them I get the below message

"This self extracting zip file is part of a multidisk zip file. Please insert the last disk of the set.. and if you click ok it says an error accoured while unzipping one of more files were not succesfully unzipped the error code is 110 ... "

What are the ways in which this can be tackled ???

 

PeteC,

I surf internet in my laptop through bluetooth connection (via mobile). How do I connect to internet and download if I don't have wireless driver or bluetooth drivers(reqd for connecting to internet) installed? (Assuming i have booted win xp at this moment).


(Or Shall I connect to internet while in Vista and download the files again ) ???

All the drivers were downloaded from one dell link only (whose reference was given in the link that you had provided very first time).

 

I could not download the drivers from the given link. Everytime i clicked "download" it starts downloading dell driver downloader manager. Even if they say it is not mandatory, it starts downloading. And when i downloaded the manager and tried downloading the drivers, a 9.29kb of file is downloaded everytime with the driver name and clicking whom gives a message "There are no files to download. Please go to Drivers and Downloaders to select files ". I tried searching for this so called message only to find an explanation (in some forum) from dell support that it was kind of bug that was removed and we can now download with browsers or other tool. I feel worst after wasting 2 hrs of experimentation on this dell support.

PeteC,

Pls help me with another tried link for those drivers to be downloaded from...

Thanks a lot anyway ...!!!

 

Its been 2 weeks since I did the 'dual booting' .... and it is working fine...