External Hard disk drive

pvt6zh395dqbrj

Hi,

My laptop crapped out on me during a Prison Break marathon recently. I looked it up on google and a load of people experienced the same problem. Apparently these computers are famous for their motherboards giving up the ghost randomly.

Anywhoo - I dumped the old laptop and saved the hard drive so that I could finish watching Prison Break. I bought a fancy case so I could transform it from an internal hard drive to an external hard drive and then I plugged it into another laptop by USB and went to google and my friends on google told me that if I went to the bios I could boot from this newly external hard disk drive instead on teh internal one. So thats what I did. But when I try to boot up windows from the external HDD it tells me that there is some fatal error and windows has been shut down to prevent damage. Its some sort of technical blue screen with loads of numbers on it.

However, when I try to boot linux from the same hard drive, it boots without a problem.

Also - if I boot from the internal HDD I can see the external one and can use all the files there and stuff but I can't run programs. Which is fine for now when I'm just watching Prison break. But I really want to run the program I bought that generates a random prison and gives you the best way to break out of it.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Kinetic^

Windows was not built to run from an external hard drive.

pvt6zh395dqbrj

ok,

but does that mean it can't be done?

Also - whats the difference? How does the computer know its an external hard drive...?

Kinetic^

With an installation already, probably not. With a new install it could be done but apparently not worth the hassle.

The motherboard recognises what type of connection the hard drive is being accessed through. When windows loads it restarts the driver initialisation and will then not see your external hdd.

stephendevlin

If you can see and use the files why not just transfer them over to your laptop? You can use away at them on your new drive.

Clareman

You'll be able to boot off USB to run windows, but probably not via an external harddrive, the speed just isn't fast enough, there might also be a problem getting to the boot sector of the drive. Another problem is, the Windows on the external drive is setup for all the hardware in your old laptop, putting it into another system is confusing it (hence blue screen), you could boot to safemode, remove everything from device manager and try again.

What I would do, is like others mentioned, just use it as an external drive for backing up your new laptop

darraghking22

what @clareman said is spot on.

each windows install is specific to the hardware its installed to, windows can be set up and run fom ext usb drive but it has to be set up connected to a specific machine and the installation will work only with that machine.

you could install that hard drive into another laptop and run ubuntu on the laptop.this way you can access all your prison break.ubuntu is free to download, if your ok with doing the bootable disc burn (can be complicated)

or pop the drie in another laptop, reinstall windows (without deleting the drive before the install)
all your files from the old windows installation will be moved to a new folder called windows.old, located on your c: drive.

PM me if you have any questions or if you need windows install discs