propblem when booting into xp on external (question)

first off ill say that want my main drive on my macbook pro to be free of windows because when i had vista installed with boot camp it continually showed results in spotlight and i also don't have much space left for my video editing files on my 80 gb main drive.

while i had vista installed with boot camp on my main drive i managed to install my parent's copy of windows xp sp2 on an NTFS partition on my external drive. to boot into Windows xp all i had to do was connect it via usb and choose it in the EFI boot selector, although it came up with a internal hard drive icon (probably thinking it was going to boot into vista, but actually it booted into xp). i then removed vista on my boot camp partition as i didnt want it anymore.

but now i cant even boot into xp on the external. nothing shows up in the efi boot selector BUT it shows up in the startup disk preference pane but it doesn't work if i select it and then restart.

how can force my macbook pro to boot into windows xp on my external? it did it before while i had vista installed on my boot camp partition but it mysteriously does appear to know?

thanks for reading, i look forward to any reply. thanks

bump

does anyone know? please help.

no i havent. steps 1-9 do not apply to me as i succesfully installed windows xp on my external not using those steps . i managed to boot to xp and setup it up and install the boot camp drivers, games ,mac drive, itunes etc. but then when i deleted vista of my main hard drive i could not boot to xp. i have tried to bit at the bottom in that guide about using the startup disk pref pane... but again as i wrote above it did not work.

so is there anyway for me to boot into xp? or am i screwed? those steps where for a macbook whose HD is very easy to take out. im doing this on macbook pro and im not going to be be taking out my HD to void the warranty. i managed to install and boot into xp on my external HD while i had vista on my main HD. now xp simply wont boot after a removed vista. there must be a way to boot into xp???

my external is a usb/fw400/fw800 hard drive and ive tried firewire but unfortunately it still doesnt boot.

netrestore looks nice but i wont be able to use it until i successfully boot into windows again.

hmm so theres no solution? the startup disk pref pane definitely picks up windows as a startup disk. Its called Windows on Untitled (that's the name of my disk after installing xp).