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.