Dual Boot With External Hard Drive Or USB
Dec 30, 2009
I have a Dell Inspiron 1440 laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. Some of my older applications do not support this platform. My processor does not support Window Virtual PC and Windows XP mode so I was hoping to add XP as a dual boot. Is it possible to boot XP from an external harddrive or USB instead of having to partition the internal hard drive. Or do you have any suggestions on how I can load XP after Windows 7 is already loaded.
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May 1, 2009
can I dual boot using an ext. Hard drive. I found an old 250gb phanton hd I've never used. Figured I could throw it in there. Would vista dual boot to that. Or no??
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Jun 21, 2010
Is it possible to dual boot windows 7 and ubuntu, with ubuntu on a external hard drive? I can connect my external hard drive via USB 2.0, USB 3.0 or E-SATA. I want windows 7 as my main OS.
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Dec 6, 2009
I've just got a new HP laptop with windows 7 Home Premium.
Anytime Upgraded to Ultimate.
i want to boot to windows XP (SP2) on this new laptop..(Not necessarily Dual-Boot). there is only on program i need to use under XP.
the dual-booting tutorials here are quite in depth and potentially problematic for none techie like me. i would prefer not re-partion the drive and 'hide' one operating system from the other, so what i would prefer to do is this...
1. Plug in an External hard drive (USB 2.0).Clean and factory formatted.
2. Go into my BIOS > Disable boot from internal hard drive > enable boot from CD Drive (first)
3. Exit BIOS having saved changes
4. insert win XP Install disk in drive.
So, in theory XP Install should be like on a brand new machine.
when i want to use windows 7 i would reverse the BIOS changes and make sure external drive with XP is not connected.
So, windows 7 would not know XP is even in use.
Is all this viable... or is there something that would prevent it from working?
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Oct 23, 2009
I currently have a system running XP with two IDE hard drives and 3 partitions.
I have taken Windows 7 as a chance to get myself some much needed extra space! and purchased a new 1tb SATA drive.
I really dont want to lose the exisitng data I have so my original plan was to take my main IDE harddrive with most of my data stick it in an external USB carrier and then start fresh in the system with the 1tb and Windows 7.
What would be cooler would be if I could add the 1tb to the exisiting system and install Windows 7 on that (ideally with that as C and either then have much quicker access to transfer data to the new drive or even dual boot with XP at first incase I have any issues with Windows 7. Can anyone advice me on how easy/risky this is? And what they would suggest to someone trying to maximise the uptime of their PC?
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Sep 7, 2009
I have a 300gb harddrive that i shrank by 50gb to make room for a windows 7 rc1 32 bit dual boot. I now need to extend the partition because i have almost filled it up. When i shrink the main partition (the 238gb one) that has vista on it, it won't let me extend the windows 7 partition onto it.
This is what it looks like in diskmgmt.msc
Vista (188gb)/Unallocated space (~50gb)/Windows (50gb)/HP_RECPVERY (9.91gb)
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Jan 11, 2013
I have just replaced the hard drive on my laptop as the original was starting to fail. I created an image of the windows 7 pro 32bit original drive. I replaced the hard drive and installed a clean 64 bit version of windows. I have also installed a clean 32 bit version as a dual boot. I now want to use the original image of the 32 bit system and install this on the clean 32 bit installation.I have tried this using the image software I have (snapshot) but cannot get it to work.
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Oct 11, 2012
My Acer netbook has developed some kind of fault and I am unsure as to what I ought to do. The netbook does boot to BIOS and also will boot up from an external drive...but will not boot normally. I am thinking of replacing the hard drive but don't know if there could be something else wrong. It says sometimes that it can't read it and from this I am not sure if there is something else wrong. If I change the drive does it sound as though things will work? There are also a couple of other intermittent faults such as certain letters and numbers not working and then everything is fine for a while...
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Jun 6, 2010
I just restarted my PC and i kept getting erros regarding hardware, at first it would just hold at updating dmi pool , after i reset the bios to fail safe defaults it would then give me the I/O error. I noticed my external drive was turned off and I turned it on and windows booted fine. Is there a connection here i can disable?
Windows is installed on my SSD drive not my external.
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Jan 12, 2013
What happened to my computer is, I kept getting the BSOD, I went into safe mode, removed the most recent programs I had installed, and it stopped happening. I then proceeded to plug in my external hard drive. It was not recognizing it for some reason, so I went to disk management. It was listed there, just without a drive letter. I tried to assign it a drive letter, and it gave me an error message saying something about refreshing the list, (this is the error message I should have researched), I tried refreshing the drive list, and tried reassigning the drive letter, same message. I right clicked on the drive again, and I saw mark as active. For some stupid reason, I clicked on this. Then seeing that it didn't do anything, I thought maybe restarting the computer would maybe do the trick. Now my computer won't boot.
It gets to the windows logo, and boom, restarts all over again. I tried many things like, startup repair, system restore, marking partition as active CMD, with diskpart, I also tried some of the commands in bootrec.exe. By the way, if this helps at all, my hard drive is a solid state drive, I also have a slave drive in there which does also have a copy of windows installed on it, (it was my old hard drive), I tried setting that as my primary boot and it boots into my old install of windows, before i got my solid state drive. Is there a way I can fix the startup by having access to it from an operating system instead of the recovery environment?
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Sep 29, 2011
About 6 months ago I set up a new machine dual boot using GParted with the following configuration:
/dev/sda1 ntfs (Windows 7 system reserved) 100 MB
/dev/sda2 ntfs (Windows7 C: drive) 99 GB (includes 4 GB of preloaded page file space)
/dev/sda3 ntfs (Shared drive - Windows7 E: Drive / Ubuntu sda3) 801 GB
/dev/sda4 extended partition 32 GB
/dev/sda5 ext4 (Linux Root) 30 GB
/dev/sda6 linux-swap 2 GB
I set it up so that I could access my E: drive from either the windows or ubuntu operating system. It has worked perfectly so far (about 6 months). But, here is the problem:For some reason as the share drive (my E: drive / sda3) grows Windows thinks that the windows system drive (sda2/c:drive) is also growing. So that now I have a low storage warning stating that there is only 8.76 GB of free space left on my 99 GB C: drive. When, in reality, there should be about 77 GB of free space. I've made hidden files/folders viewable and downloaded treesizefree so I know what should be on the drive. The Treesizefree output shows the expected 22 GB of space but also shows only 9 GB of free space. So, the missing space is nearly exactly the size of my shared drive (sda3/E:drive). So somehow, I think the windows OS is double counting my shared E: drive against my C: drive.
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Jan 21, 2012
I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 (2.5 years old). All my data is backed up so I have no concerns about recoverying data.First, the laptop crashed and ran several chkdsk on start up. I froze several times during this. It said it had fixed some errors then started up again.This time it wanted to do start up repair. Same thing kept happening, froze at least twenty times during this. Eventually it gave me the blue screen of death.
'Technical information
*** STOP: 0x000000F4 (0x0000000000000003, 0xFFFFFA8004C1D260, 0xFFFFFA8004C1D498, 0xFFFFF8000130DDA0)'
This repeated several times. I ran the diagnostics and it told me the hard drive could not be found (error code 0146, 2000-0146). Essentially, it's a Dell laptop (I know) and I am not bothered about recovering the hard drive.I would, however, like to install Windows 7, or alternatively Linux, onto my external hard drive. But I just can't seem to get it to work.I have extracted a Linux iso to the external hard drive I want to install on, onto a cd, onto a FAT32 8gb usb stick, but it has given me the bootmgr is missing error every time. I have tried it with the interal HDD in and removed.I am no longer concerned about the internal HDD, i can use it for a door stop for all I am concerned, I just want to load ANY os onto my external hard drive so I can get the laptop working.
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Mar 28, 2012
my desktop computer won't boot. When I turn it on it displays the welcome splash screen and then goes black. A message will then display that says CMD failed to start and then it will shut down. It does the same thing in safe mode as well.My question is. I have already set up the HD from the desktop as an external to my laptop so I could get files off it. Is there any way to do system restore on the hard drive when it is set as an external? Because I did this last night and I think if I restore the drive it will fix it.
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Mar 14, 2012
I installed Ubuntu on a older Toshiba laptop. When I boot up it asks me to select either Windows 7 or Ubuntu. I want to get rid of the Ubuntu disk partition and give that 2.9 GB space to my primary hard drive. I go into compmgmt.msc but I can't execute any commands on that disk partition.
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Oct 23, 2011
.I didn't wait for the computer to tell me it was ok to remove the drive in the usb port. Now my computer no longer recognizes the external drive After removing my external hard drive (without the ok) my computer no longer recognizes the external hard drive. What do I do.
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Apr 16, 2012
I am trying to boot windows server installed in external hard disk from my windows 7 pc but when I am trying to do so it my pc is flashing blue screen and my pc reboots with win 7.
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Mar 30, 2012
I have an internal hard disk not in use ,and I would like to make it as external disk !I looked on the net and I found I should have the " encelsure " butt I think I wont find it here in my city .So is there another way ? like usb -esata cable
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Mar 4, 2010
Me and my brother built me a new computer from scratch (he did the building - i did the watching). I purchased an internal hard drive from Overclockers UK. It's a Samsung 1TB drive. I also have a 64 Solid-state drive in there as my primary hard drive that Windows was installed on and a couple of programs are installed on. My storage disk (the 1TB disk) is for all my music/films etc. Whenever I drag and drop a file into the Samsung hard-drive - it copies it rather than moves it instantly.When I had a laptop, I had 3 external hard drives and this is the way it copied files onto them.how I can get the internal drive to stop acting like an external drive?
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Nov 12, 2009
As currently configured, XP is on drive C:, Win 7 was added to drive E:, and the system is currently run as a dual boot. Attempting to boot without the XP drive present will yield a "NTLDR is missing" error very early in the boot process.
I have already tried the following:
(1) I moved the hidden Windows Boot Manager files (bootmgr as well as the associated Boot folder) from the XP drive root to the Win 7 drive root.
(2) After physically removing the XP drive, I rebooted to the Win 7 installation DVD, and used the "Repair Your Computer" option to pull up the "Recovery Tools". Then, using the command prompt utility, ...
(3) I attempted to write a new boot sector to the Windows 7 disk using the command: Bootrec /fixboot, - that yields an error though. The Bootrec /fixmbr claimed success, but ultimately did not make Win 7 drive bootable.
I had to reconnect drive C: just to boot into Win 7 again to write this. I do have files backed up, but to format and reinstall files would take many hours beyond just the time to transfer 400 GB of data, since I have dozens of purchased applications that need to be freshly reinstalled and validated as well. Basically I want my E: drive now to be my boot drive while the C: drive is reformatted and used for general storage.
Any idea how to make my Win 7 drive bootable? Do I need a partition program that is more adept at creating a viable boot sector, or is that even the problem?
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Sep 12, 2011
i have a new work laptop with xp sp3 on it. I want to install w7 64 bit as a dual boot, but only have 1 physical drive. i cannot remove my current installation as it is pre-build from work, but can partition the drive etc. However on trying to install w7 64 bit I get a message saying cannot install windows 7 on efi drive with mbr, not gpt. Can I do what I want without screwing up my xp installation?
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Aug 21, 2012
I have a USB external hard drive that I keep all my documents etc on (had it for years)I upgraded from Vista Home to & Home Premium then had to upgrade recently to Professional to run my Sage. Through all these upgrades my ext. drive ran fine. Occasionally the drvie letter would change if I had something else plugged into the USB, this was always easily corected in disk management by changing the drive path.The connection on the case packed up so I had to get the drive put into a new case, now when I plug it in the drive is assigned G instead of F, I tried to change the drive letter allocation in Disk Management but it won't let me as the program still thinks I have a second ext. hard drive which is labelled F. I suspect this has happened because when the usb connection broke the drive was disconnected suddenly instead of a proper eject.How do I get Disk Management to remove the inactive drive - i can't find any obvious way - eject, delete etc are all missing when I click on tools or tasks.
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Nov 13, 2012
Low disk space, Can transfer data on D drive to an external hard drive
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Jun 25, 2011
I can see my external hard drive in device manager, but not in my comp
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Nov 8, 2010
I just got an external hard drive yesterday, and have been asking a few questions on this forum. So far, people have managed to be very helpful with the previous questions, hopefully someone can do so here too.Reinstalling all my games to external hard drive, need to know if they will / how to make them appear / function properly in my GEF, whether added automatically or manually.I am basically going to have EVERYTHING put onto my 1TB external, and by everything I mean "Music, Pictures, Videos, Documents, Games, and maybe Programs". So, I made a folder for each of those things on it,and only now that I am reinstalling my games into the Programs one have I realized something.I am a bit obsessive about having a fully functioning Game Explorer Folder (GEF) with all my games visible in it. It's my assumption that when I install into an external hard drive, none of those games will be automatically added into the GEF. However, if I add them in manually (using the regedit method in the tutorial), should everything function properly, so long as I have my external hard drive on whenever I use the computer?I just need this to be confirmed before I start reinstalling more. Also, if not, please let me know if there IS a way to get them to show up in my GEF properly, or possibly move the GEF to the external hard drive or get it to recognize things from a different directory.
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Oct 27, 2009
In order to make upgrading via a clean install easier -- and because I've been considering one for awhile anyway -- I'm looking at picking up a decent external hard drives right now... and can't seem to find a clear answer to something:
Will I see any drop off in quality of playback or computer performance if I use a drive like this (external, USB) to store all of my recorded videos. The tuner and Media center would save everything directly to this drive and play everything directly from it. Would that cause any problems at all? I notice that it requires no power adapter since it's USB powered, and it has a Interface Transfer Rate of 480 Mbps -- not sure how either of these apply to my potential use of it.
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May 18, 2012
if I could use my external hard drive to install windows 7 on a new build with a new hard drive?
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Dec 6, 2011
I have a M2010 running Windows 7 ultimate using raid. I was wondering if I put in a hd in the secondary spot if I could add XP Pro and dual boot. I have some things that work better under XP. I put my old laptop drive in and set the bios raid to auto detect/ata. It booted to 7 and installed drive E:. I didn't change any Matrix software settings so it's a raid/non raid setup.
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Jun 7, 2011
I know at this point it's tricky and i should have done it before installing Windows 7 however...My new physical primary drive now has Windows 7 pro running exclusively the whole partition (cI'd like to add the drive that had XP pro running on the same PC.i'd like to get this running as a duel boot without corrupting the XP drive.
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May 19, 2010
1st. Installed XP on IDE drive, 2nd. installed a Sata drive, installed Windows 7 on that drive, want to remove the IDE drive, is it as simple as disconnecting the XP drive and do a startup repair, or is there going to be an issue with the XP drive being the Active drive, will startup repair make the Sata drive the Active drive?
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Jan 2, 2010
I have Win XP 32 bit on my old drive. I buy Win 7 full retail and a new HD. I set bios to boot from cd etc. Win 7 starts up. It shows the 2 drives, so I select new drive...no problems. It starts install. I leave it to do its stuff.When I come back its up and all ok.I dint get any option to boot from XP. The drive was listed as "SYSTEM" but not old Windows or anything.
Also ASUS chipset drivers dont work and they were listed as 7 drivers.I tried Vista drivers but it normally shuts down and restarts. Nothing.
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Jan 4, 2012
Attached an external sata hd with an esata connection. After power boot, external drive not recognized and also secondary internal sata hd not recognized.
Do I need to do something to the BIOS?Sinch stonooka has chosen the best answer to his/her question.Click here to view the answer that was selected.
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