Booting from a USB Hard Drive-is it possible

Hello,

I have a question regarding booting up different OSes. I have an Alienware laptop and thanks to my own stupidity, I ended up downloading a virus....well I did a complete reformat and reinstalled all of my software. Then I get my free Vista upgrade disk in the mail and I installed it. To make a long story short some of my favorite games wouldn't work anymore on Vista, but ran fine under XP.

So, I reformated the hard drive.....again..and went back to XP. I have 3 versions of XP, plus the upgrade disk for Vista and while I liked the graphics and the neat features, of Vista.....would it be possible to install XP/Vista on my 250 gig Maxtor HD in a USB enclosure and be able to switch back to the Laptop's HD when I want to game and my regular stuff??? Is it possible to have it do this from the BIOS???

Also, could I use this idea to load up a Linux harddrive like Ubuntu?

Let me know


Thanks.

 

http://www.hddsaver.com/content/18/index.html

 

Thank you, i'll give it a shot