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How do I Boot a USB External Hard Drive?

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5 replies

by nguyendtran

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Hello all, I have a an external 2.5" USB hard drive and want to know if I can boot from it. It is a Windows XP SP2 OS. The hard drive came from a Sony Vaio laptop. The Laptop went dead so I took the hard drive out and put it in a USB 2.0 HDD enclosure. Now I have a Compaq Presarior C500 laptop with Vista Business OS installed on it and wonder how I can boot the USB external HDD to recover and transfer my saved data. When I checked the BIOS, it does show USB HARD DRIVE boot and I placed that as my first boot but it did not work.

Note: When I connect the USB HDD to my compaq laptop or on my XP PRO SP2 PC at home, it recognizes as a drive and sees all the documents and settings; however I cannot access my profile since it is password protected.

5 replies

by dan.cox

Is the drive partition set to active?
This will work.
I setup an external USB hard drive which boots into Windows PE.
I had to first set the partician to active before it would work.

by oh smeg

However you can slave the HDD and recover your data off it and it should be fairly easy to do provided that you don't have Vista on the new unit as the Default E-Mail Client is different and all the tools that you need to use are also different.

To get to your Data in XP all you need do is take ownership of the files by following the directions here

http://tinyurl.com/3aw7

Col

by dragonsrage99

hi Nguy,

it all depends on how modern the laptop is, most modern laptops and pc's will have a option in bios which will enable yo to select the boot order, you should hopefully have an option for USB device or USB hard drive, i know on my PC i have an option to setup USB devices and specify what the PC sees it as, ie i have 1 USB hard disc setup as a CD drive as i have lots of ISO files on it, and i have 1 other USB pen drive setup as a hard disc so it uses it normally. if you have a look in your bios you should see an option that should let you run from it directly - but i think its a case of trying each option rebooting and seeing if it works.

im not sure if you can download a boot disc which will effectivly install the USB drivers and then allow it to run, but it might be worth a google search, just in case.

failing that you should be able to actually swap out the hard drive from you working laptop change the cradle and put the disc into your working laptop - you wont have any drivers enabled but you will be able to access windows and then u can move all files to the root (c:) and then change the properties on them to Everyone full access - then u can swap back and you should be able to get your files off the drive.

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