Just to let you all know (and the reason for top posting).... The install of Centos with XEN went with no problems. Just had to be VERY careful and NOT touch hda1. Booting was taking 10min or more. Timeouts. On study, it was USB related and the drive I am using is .7A (3.5W ie more than USB spec...). So I have to look for a .5A drive! BTW, I have some internal IDE 3.5:2.5 converters and these are ONLY booting .5A laptop drives. Won't even spin up .7A drives. But the big looser with my dreams is running XP inside of XEN. You have to set up an LVM partition then install XP into it withing XEN. And I cannot touch that drive. Sigh. Back to other projects. Scott Silva wrote: > on 1/7/2008 1:46 AM John R Pierce spake the following: >> John Bowden wrote: >>> I have a external USB HD enclosure that takes its power from the one >>> USB socket. Its only failed to do so on one oldish tower that a >>> friend of mine has, on that machine it needed the second "power" >>> connection. Got it from Ebay >> >> >> thts also out of spec, as USB is speced for 2.5 watts, 500mA at 5V, >> per port. Typlical laptop HD is like 5 watts, more when spinning up. >> >> >> yes, I know it usually works. just saying... > Sometimes you can find small 4 to 6 gig closeout drives with lower > power requirements. And you can look around for 1.8 inch drives and > enclosures. That should run on a single port. > >