I would like to load a copy of my trading platform, charting software, eSignal and my spreadsheets on a portable hard drive so when I go to another location I can just plug it in to a USB port and execute. I have a 250 gig USB drive which will be way more than enough but I need to know, during the installation process, is there any specifics I need to know to make sure no random files get loaded on the host computer making the whole operation useless. Thanks in advance guys!!!
There are lots of apps which will run off of a portable drive, but they are "special editions"... modified to run from there and not access the normal system drive for reads/writes. I'd be surprised if you can accomplish what you hope.
I'm thinking the only way I can accomplish this is to reformat a computer and, using the portable drive as the boot drive, load the operating system and all programs I need on the portable drive. Then if I want to use it, boot from the portable drive when it's attached to another computer.
Something like that... but the software probably needs to be reworked so that it doesn't look for the C: drive for anything. Might be an interesting project, as there are flash drives of 8MB+ which could handle it.
I used to run sierrachart right out of my 2G USB. What I did was I installed a copy of sierrachart on USB drive then copied all of charts, setups to that drive. You might also want to try wi-fire port instead of USB to accomodate a large amount of data moving back and forth.
Yeah, it would be (likely) missing all the hardware drivers to function properly (assuming you're using XP?). I've tried something similar after building a new computer - just plugged in the old hard drive with the OS already on it. It does (or did in my case) boot-up, as it seems Windows adapts quite readily to the new hardware configuration. But it would still be missing the drivers for peripherals to work properly. In particular the video drivers to set the screen resolution beyond basic VGA; motherboard drivers to get all the ports to work properly and any inbuilt devices such as network cards, sound etc; and drivers for external devices. Although they may be detected automatically if they're in the driver library already. If the 'second location' computer is always going to be the same, you can load on the necessary drivers onto your portable OS drive when it's connected to that PC and the OS would just use which ever drivers it needs depending on which PC it's connected to.
one of the lesser known features of windows is hardware profiles... If you know which computer(s) you are going to be plugging into, you can setup a hardware profile for each computer. what you want to do is certainly doable....but it will be a hassle to setup and a bigger hassle to maintain.