Boot off previous drive?

C

Cavalerius

New Member
So I recently got a 500gb ssd for my laptop, installed it & put win10 onto it and I'm trying to install the other programs onto it that I had on my old hd which ran win8. But I can't remember or find some of them when I have that old hd usb connected, and some of the applications worked in tandem really well.

Is there a way to boot off the old hd without putting it back in?
 
What kind of programs? You can't really just launch the .exe for the program off the old hard drive as Windows doesn't consider the program installed and won't have the proper registry set up for it. Some programs will still run fine, but you really need to just reinstall them fresh.
 
Darren said:
What kind of programs? You can't really just launch the .exe for the program off the old hard drive as Windows doesn't consider the program installed and won't have the proper registry set up for it. Some programs will still run fine, but you really need to just reinstall them fresh.
Click to expand...

Soo, I can't remember or find some of the programs...
May have confused you so will try again.

I have an MSI ge60 apache pro which shipped with a typical 1tb HD running windows 8. On that HD were a multitude of programs, applications to do with customisation, productivity, etc. that I installed which all started up as soon as you login.
I have since replaced that HD in my MSI laptop with an SSD and have installed win10 onto it. I wish to download the same programs to do with customisation, productivity etc. onto this new ssd but I cannot remember the names of the programs, and when connecting via usb my old HD to find the names of those old programs I can only find like, 3 of the 8 programs I used.

Now, when the old HD with win8 was still installed all those programs started up and worked in tandem as soon as you logged in, and they very usefully told you the name of each program when it automatically started up. I need the names of those programs, but they only show when logging in on that HD.

A simple solution would be to simply pull out that SSD, and put the old HD back in, but that means unscrewing all the bolts and crap. Is it possible to boot off the old HD without putting it back in the laptop?
 
I'm not sure if it's the all in 1 HDD external docking system I have or not, but it doesn't seem to pick it up as a boot drive. Have no other connector to the laptop either. Ehh, suppose I can just look around for new customisation & productivity options on the internet...
 
With the docking station attached to the system, go into the bios and set usb to first boot option. It won't appear unless the system recognizes a usb device. It may be the docking station that is not not causing it to appear. You may just need a usb adapter such as this.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002

Also, it may help to search the startup folder on the drive. Most programs will appear there if they are set to autorun at startup.

C:\Users\"your user account"\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

You'll need to enable hidden files and folders to view app data folder.
 
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