How to boot from external USB hard drive easiest way?

P

postcd

Member
Hello,

i know how to boot from USB flash drives (how to enable it in BIOS), but i was not able to boot from my external HDD.

The computer on which im trying to boot has UEFI BIOS UTILITY version 2.10.1208 from 2012

I was able to get into boot menu where i seen all internal HDDs, CDROM but not external drive. Even drive is spinning up (to get recognized) before entering BIOS.

Can be problem that i connecting it via front panel of the PC? USB flash drives always worked there..

I was thinking if there is not any program i can load onto bootamble flash and it will then allow loading OS from my ext. drive), but cant google anything

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About external USB drive
The ext. drrive im trying to boot is 3.5. Maxtor basics 1TB budget external drive i created new partition on it, marked Active and Primary and installed Vista 32bit on it. It was bootamble when used as internal drive, but when im trying to boot it as external drive on this PC, it fails (is nto recognized in boot menu even its spinning up to be recognized)


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My aim
My aim is to have Windows OS on an external (portable) drive (i have DVD,flash,HDD). Drive must be capable of saving data (around 20GB of data including OS). I will be using it the way that there will be minimum writing cycles and i do not care much about slow boot time.

Thank you
 
If you installed vista to this drive while inside/attached to a different pc then its not gonna work. You can't boot to an external drive with windows on it on a machine other than the one it was attached to when installing windows. And since you marked it active and primary, the reason why its not booting because the mbr is designating the wrong drive now. Are your intentions to use this on multiple pc's?
 
johnb35 said:
If you installed vista to this drive while inside/attached to a different pc then its not gonna work. ... Are your intentions to use this on multiple pc's?
Click to expand...
I can confirm that. In case of Vista, (maybe other/older OS would work) it start booting, i seen Vista progress bar for couple of seconds and then PC got resetted. It is sufficing for me to use this external drive only on one PC i dont need it super portable in this case.

SpriteMidr said:
Have you tried installing PLoP using EasyBCD?
Click to expand...
thx, i just tried it. Was not super easy to setup bootable flash with PLoP, but i made it. It can then show bootmenu as per your screenshot allowing to choose some partition to boot from. But it WAS NOT usefull to detect external USB hard drive, only USB flash drive, internal drives as per the screenshot above.

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I made my BIOS (UEFI BIOS UTILITY version 2.10.1208) to detect USB external drive (and USB flash drive too) by doing following steps:

o Del (to enter BIOS)
|_o Advanced mode
|..|_o Advanced
|.....|_o USB configuration
|........|_o Legacy USB support - Enabled
|_o Boot
...|_o CSM (Compatibility support mode)
......|_o Boot device control - UEFI and Legacy OpROM

These two settings was all that was needed to recognize both USB flash and USB external HDD and alloow booting it. Just from BIOS without any EasyBCD or such.
 
Last edited:
The drivers won't work and stuff. Use Unetbootin and Windows 7. This allows you to make a Windows To-Go drive. This allows it to read the correct drivers everytime it boots on a new pc!
 
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