How to run LabView from usb hardisk?

[Imran Shahid]

Hi,

I want to install LabView on my USB hard disk so that i can plug it into any PC and start working on LabView there. Is it possible? If no, then why? And if yes then how?

Can anyone help...
Imran

[m3nth]

Imram,

Please ignore the previous rude comment... I'm sure that will be dealt with accordingly.

Running LabVIEW from a USB drive sounds pretty interesting. While I personally have no idea if you could do it or not, here are some things to consider:

- I'm pretty sure (although I haven't read the license agreement in awhile) that you can run LabVIEW on multiple PC's so long as you're the only one using it and you're only using one of those at a time. Having LabVIEW on different PC's may not be your objective however, or you may not be able to install it on the PC you're using.

- If you were to install LabVIEW on a USB drive you would need the right amount of space on your drive to hold the stuff required for LabVIEW to work right. What that stuff is, and exactly how large it is I'm not sure. My LabVIEW directory has 700Mb of stuff in it, a lot of which I'm sure isn't necessary (like all of the example programs). You might not be able to install LabVIEW on a drive that's smaller than 512Mb (after getting rid of unecessary stuff), or on the other hand, you might be able to run a bare minimum of files and get away with something really small (32Mb range). I doubt you'd be able to do the latter.

- For sure it would be slow. Even with a USB2 drive. I use my USB drive to take my copy of Firefox wherever I go and it's slow, and Firefox isn't nearly as big as the 11Mb LabVIEW executable. For that reason alone I wouldn't recommend it.

- There may be registered services and registry keys that LabVIEW requires to run, in which case you would have to install _something_ on the computer you want to use so that it would work right. Installing things on computers these days is a lot more difficult than it used to be. Your USB drive doesn't have a nice windows registry to keep track of things like a computer does 🙂

- If you had the option of installing LabVIEW on the computers you want to use, you could always just set up a VI directory structure so you could still take your work aorund with you.

- To test and see if you'll be able to get it working from your USB disk here's what I would try (especially if you have a network which would make it easy to transfer stuff). Set up a copy of the LabVIEW directory on the computer where LabVIEW is not installed. See if it works 🙂 Pretty simple eh? 🙂 If it actually did, you'd be able to delete stuff like the examples and help files or whatever else you wanted to strip down and see if it would still run. If a set of files will run on a computer without the installation package having been run, then it will work fine from your USB drive too on a computer where it hasn't been installed.

[EdDickens]

One problem you might run into is registry entries. Even if you only ran it on a single computer, there's no way guarantee that every time you insert your USB drive, that it would get the same drive letter. This would make all the path dependent registry entries point to the wrong place.

Other than that, I don't see why it wouldn't work as long as you have enough space and don't mind it being slow. As was already stated, even USB 2 has only a fraction of the speed of a hard drive.

Another option would be to look into a removable hard drive kit.

Ed