[ridius]

I have a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Pro 500GB USB Hard drive. I want to be able to use it as a USB Boot drive. So I repartitioned the drive to have an 8GB FAT32 partition and a 457GB NTFS partition (the partitions are in this order). I made sure that the drive performance was set to Quick Removal and I can stop the drives by clicking on the USB icon in System Tray.

My problem is that in Explorer, the devices show up as Hard Drives (right next to C:) and not as removable drives. In order for me to use the USB/DVD tool to install the Windows 8 Preview, the target drive must be recognized as a removable drive.

I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit (it's an older PC) and Seagate does not provide their own driver for this drive. It is using the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\disk.sys and C:\Windows\System32\drivers\partmgr.sys drivers.

When I try to specify a driver manually, the usbstor.sys driver isn't listed as compatible with my device.

Any ideas on how to get this drive to display as Removable?

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The USB/DVD thing for the Windows 8 preview wants access to either a USB stick (pen drive) or a DVD. Not an external hard drive.

In any case, you can't install Windows onto an external hard drive.

[Neil Jones]

The USB/DVD thing for the Windows 8 preview wants access to either a USB stick (pen drive) or a DVD. Not an external hard drive.

In any case, you can't install Windows onto an external hard drive.

[ridius]

In any case, you can't install Windows onto an external hard drive.

Thanks for the info!

I wasn't trying to install Windows onto an external HD. I am trying to put the Windows Installer on the external HD (the same way you can put the Windows 7 Installer on a bootable USB HD). My problem is that my USB HD is not showing up as a removable drive and because of that, the tool I linked to won't recognize it.