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I have Windows 7 installed on a laptop hard drive. I would like to be able to boot this from USB. From my research, Windows cycles USB power on and off during boot which prevents the laptop from booting Windows via USB. Is there a way to change the boot sequence to prevent it from cycling USB power?

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Windows can perfectly boot from an USB drive although some tweaks. I don't remember that power cycling was an issue when reading such articles... – Tom Wijsman Jan 29 '11 at 19:31
Most articles I have read say that Windows 7 cannot boot from USB. You can make a live USB load to boot and install onto a system, like a netbook without CD/DVD rom, but you "can't" do a complete system install. I put the hard drive in my laptop in place of the original and I loaded Win 7 onto it. I then tried to tell it to boot from the hard drive through USB. It begins to load and you can watch the power light go out on the external drive and it stops loading. It will then go back to the original load screen. – Tom Jan 29 '11 at 22:40
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Raymond Chen explicitly states on his blog that Windows cannot be installed on USB because whenever something is plugged in or removed, the entire USB interface is reset. See blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/04/15/113811.aspx for more. – Randolph West Jan 30 '11 at 3:14
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