The recovery software will be booting from the external drive.
XP can't boot from an external drive.
Can't you create a bootable cd or dvd?
--
Ron Sommer

"tradermj" <tradermj@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:7744E577-CD88-4891-AFED-261D425B027D@microsoft.com...
> Actually, it will remain an external drive. I want to be able to boot
> from
> it in a recovery situation. My IBM Recovery software realizes it is an
> external drive and offers to make it bootable but only if it deletes all
> the
> data. In previous OSs there was a way to "transfer" the system files to a
> drive to make it bootable but I cannot find one for XP. May be out of
> luck
> without reformatting the drive.
>
>
>
> "Pegasus (MVP)" wrote:
>
>>
>> "tradermj" <tradermj@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
>> news:61571B6B-7D14-48F5-A9EE-90B8C6CBC526@microsoft.com...
>> > I have an external hard drive that is NTFS formatted. I need to make
>> > this
>> > drive bootable without reformatting and deleting all the data. There
>> > used
>> to
>> > be format or sys commands to do this but I cannot find a way to do this
>> > in
>> XP.
>> >
>>
>> I assume that
>> a) You're going to make this disk an internal disk, and
>> b) It will be your primary master disk
>> c) This disk contains a working version of WinXP on its
>> active partition.
>>
>> If so then you can do this to make it bootable:
>> - Boot the machine with your WinXP CD
>> - Select Repair, then Recovery Console
>> - Type these commands
>> fixboot
>> fixmbr
>> exit
>>
>>
>>