Question about booting from a USB drive

[billpa]

This is kind of non-arcade related but I figured I could get an answer as I am stumped. My dad's computer's mobo took a crap so he went out and bought a new computer about a month ago. It runs Vista, which he likes except for some programs that he cannot run, which is on his old hard drive. I purchased an enclosure and put the drive in. I attached it to my pc that I run MAME on and tried to boot from USB. It goes through the process but then gets to the screen that you get when you power down the computer improperly. I select use latest configuration to boot and then it goes back through the process and eventually back to that screen. I tried boot from safe mode and the same thing happened.

Any ideas on what I am doing wrong?

Cheers,
Bill

[gonzo90017]

Well if it had xp on it you can't boot it from another computer unless they both have similar mobos. If you're just trying to recover files just hook it up to usb and boot up your mame cab like normal and recover the files that way.

[amadama]

You are not doing anything wrong.
Windows does not like booting from a USB drive. During the boot process when the USB drivers get initialized Windows forces a USB bus reset. This causes Windows to go nuts and it won't fully boot.
There are ways around this (do a search on Google for BartPE boot).
If you really want to boot the windows partition on your dad's PC download VMWare Server (its free) and you can virtually boot from the USB drive.
http://www.vmware.com/download/server/
If you just want to get files from the drive do as gonzo says and hook it up to your dad's PC and copy over the files you need.
Good luck!
Alex