If yours hasn't been showing something like USB-HDD in its boot order, try booting with drive connected and check the options again. Some bioses only show that option if the USB device is connected. You should be able to do this - but your machine will need to have the option to boot from the external drive in the bios I think. RE: BOOTABLE EXTERNAL USB HARD DRIVE WITH W98 I did go into the BIOS, and tried to change the boot order, but duh that didn't work either.

I figure that if you can make a USB flash bootable or a USB CD bootable, then why not a USB hard drive? I have searched the web and the closest thing that I came to was on, but I want to know how to do this (if possible) from start to finish.

I got a message stating that 'sys' is not a valid interal or external command (but of course, this is WIndows XP!) I thought that going to the command prompt and initiating the old 'sys F:' command (where 'F' is the drive letter that Windows XP assigned the USB Hard drive) would copy the system files from the Windows 98 bootable floppy that I have to the USB hard drive. In short of creating a dual-boot system, I thought that this may be easier. I have a licensed version of Windows 98, and I have older programs that WXP just will not run. I have an Apricorn external USB 2.0 20GB hard drive.

Usb flash drive for windows 98