Installing second boot of recording SW on external drive

[Ludwig77]

I have an external hard drive that I use for transferring audio files
to different studios.

My internal hard drive has my recording software installed.

I have a second license for the software and was wondering if how I
might go about installing the second copy on my external hard drive.

This would allow me to potentially take the external hard drive to
another computer system and use MY software instead of the studio's.

I know this gets into the computer geek area so perhaps I should post
there, but here's what I'm thinking could work:

Could I partition off my external hard drive, giving it a small system
partition, large enough to install a second Operating System?

I'd then install the second copy of the recording software by booting
up to the external hard drive's OS.

If this WOULD work, how would I set up the dual boot to give me the
option of booting to the external drive? Would I have to modify the
BIOS on the host computer to tell it there's a second boot?

Or is it simpler than this? If my second OS is XP, isn't there a
boot.ini file that I would simply have to manipulate in some way?

[John]

My take on this is all you have to do is install your operating system on
the external drive and then your software. Then you boot up whatever
computer you are using and hit the "Del" key to get to the bios setup.
Scroll down to the boot sequence option and make sure the external drive is
the first boot device - booting from USB will not be an option on every
computer. Good luck

John


"Ludwig77" > wrote in message
ups.com...
>I have an external hard drive that I use for transferring audio files
> to different studios.
>
> My internal hard drive has my recording software installed.
>
> I have a second license for the software and was wondering if how I
> might go about installing the second copy on my external hard drive.
>
> This would allow me to potentially take the external hard drive to
> another computer system and use MY software instead of the studio's.
>
> I know this gets into the computer geek area so perhaps I should post
> there, but here's what I'm thinking could work:
>
> Could I partition off my external hard drive, giving it a small system
> partition, large enough to install a second Operating System?
>
> I'd then install the second copy of the recording software by booting
> up to the external hard drive's OS.
>
> If this WOULD work, how would I set up the dual boot to give me the
> option of booting to the external drive? Would I have to modify the
> BIOS on the host computer to tell it there's a second boot?
>
> Or is it simpler than this? If my second OS is XP, isn't there a
> boot.ini file that I would simply have to manipulate in some way?
>

[Richard Crowley]

"Ludwig77" wrote ...
>I have an external hard drive that I use for transferring audio files
> to different studios.
>
> My internal hard drive has my recording software installed.
>
> I have a second license for the software and was wondering if how I
> might go about installing the second copy on my external hard drive.

It is extremely unlikely that this can be done successfully
with MS Windows. It likes to put DLLs in a different place(s)
and put little hooks in the registry, etc. etc. etc. :-( I won't
say that it is 100% impossible, but it is not a generic question
with a generic answer. It is possible that some apps can be
made to run from their own self-contained sub-directory.

Yes, you COULD make a separate partition with a new
(licensed?) copy of the OS, but getting random computer
to boot from a plug-in drive is even more problematic than
trying to get an application to run from an external drive.

[Laurence Payne]

On 5 Feb 2007 05:09:39 -0800, "Ludwig77" > wrote:

>My internal hard drive has my recording software installed.
>
>I have a second license for the software and was wondering if how I
>might go about installing the second copy on my external hard drive.
>
>This would allow me to potentially take the external hard drive to
>another computer system and use MY software instead of the studio'

Sorry - it won't. Software doesn't get installed to a disk, but to a
computer system. Registry entries and such. At least it does on a
PC.

[John Lamp]

John wrote:

> My take on this is all you have to do is install your operating system on
> the external drive and then your software. Then you boot up whatever
> computer you are using and hit the "Del" key to get to the bios setup.
> Scroll down to the boot sequence option and make sure the external drive is
> the first boot device - booting from USB will not be an option on every
> computer. Good luck

Trouble with that, is that the boot image on the external HD will
probably not have all the drivers for the specific hardware on all the
different machine you plug it in to.

What you need is a Portable Apps install of your software onto the
external hard drive. The PA wrapper will take care of convincing the
registry on any target machine that you have legitimately installed it
on that machine. I have a PA version of GIMP which runs fine, and am
about to use a PA version of XAMPP in teaching labs.

See http://sourceforge.net/projects/portableapps/

Hmmm ... Audacity portable ... excellent!

Cheers
Goaty
--
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/ \ meanderings. 2200-2400 Wednesday
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