Error Booting From External Hard Drive
Jan 5, 2010
I am trying to wipe my current XP installation clean and move on to Windows 7.
I first tried to install the setup.exe (Custom install option of course) from within the XP OS, but soon discovered you cannot do that and wipe out my only partition on C: at the same time.
I don't have a DVD-RW drive to write a boot disk, so instead I am trying to install through my external hard drive. I meticulously followed this tutorial from PC World yet when I instruct the PC in BIOS to boot from the external hard drive, I keep getting an "invalid system disk, press any key" error when the computer boots and looks for the setup files. This is despite the fact that setup seems to work perfectly from within the XP OS.
PC World tutorial:
Install Windows 7 From an External Hard Drive - PC World
Can anyone please offer me any helpful advice to get the external hard drive setup to work or help me find a way to install 7 from within XP?
Anyone know exactly why I keep getting the "invalid disk" error each time when I try to boot from my external hard drive? As mentioned in the PC World tutorial, I marked the external hard drive as an active partition and the setup files seem to work fine from within XP. If it helps, in the external hard drive root folder is both the Windows 7 ISO and all the files contained (which I extracted using PowerISO).
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Mar 5, 2012
Motherboard: Asus A8N5X
So after the hard drive fiasco that I reported in another thread, I got clever and decided to create an "Emergency Boot Drive" that would have Windows on it as well as some utilities for data recovery. I took one of the many old hard drives that I have floating around and plugged it into the computer AND unplugged my other two drives. Then I ran Windows Install off the DVD and installed Windows to the old drive. I installed my software. All was good. I plugged in the other two drives and tried to boot from the "Emergency" drive and it worked fine.Last step was to unplug the emergency drive from the motherboard, connect it via USB and try to boot. The BIOS sees the drive and I tell it to boot from the drive. So the computer is booting. The "Starting Windows" message comes up and then the system reboots. This happens everytime I try it.Does Windows reset the USB ports so that the drive suddenly vanishes?
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Nov 8, 2012
It just shows the blue colour only but not recognized by laptop
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Feb 14, 2012
how do I disable message that come while booting s m a r t hard drive detect error!
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Nov 17, 2012
This morning while i was watching a movie from my Toshiba 500GB external hard drive, there was a windows update going. Because of the lagging due to the update and all, I restarted it after the update is done while my ext. HD is still connected to the computer.
After restarting, somehow I can't seem to access my ext. HD even though the HD is detected. The HD somehow became a "Local Disk K:" and everytime i try clicking it a pop-up telling me that "K is not accessible. The parameter is incorrect".
I googled the problem and found one solution that told me to run a CHKDSK on the command prompt. I ran a "chkdsk /r K:" but then got stuck on the "stage 3 of 5" where the chkdsk is verifying Usn journal. This has been going on for 5 hours and the cursors still blinking.
I can access my HD again? Does the verifying Usn journal really do take this long?
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Feb 18, 2010
I am getting 2 error messages. chronically I get filedeviceHarddisc volume 3$Mft. like every 10 minutes. The other is E:vlc-1.0.5-win32exe. I reinstalled the vlc program and haven't seen that error message for awhile. I checked the hard drive with seagate and it is functioning properly.
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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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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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Jun 16, 2011
I have a HP Touchsmart IQ500. Turning my computer PC on today, all I got was a blue HP invent screen with setup, boot menu, system recovery, and system diagnosis, and I could not get past it. I entered the BIOS and figured out that the hard drive was listed as "not installed." Pretty sure that is the main problem.I tried a system restore (with the Windows 7 install disc), but I guess the computer couldn't read the hard drive enough to enter safe mode (I tried restarting and F8ing several times). I put in an external hard drive, and the BIOS read it; however, windows does not allow you to partition an OS on a hard drive.
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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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May 6, 2009
My computer yesterday was an XP machine with one hard drive. I wanted to test Windows 7 but I was afraid I would screw something up with my XP drive in the process. We'll call this Drive A.
Yesterday I bought a new hard drive, Drive B. I downloaded the Windows 7 ISO, got some drivers, and turned off my computer. I physically removed Drive A from the computer and put Drive B in. I started the computer and put the DVD in. Setup was fine, I had some trouble with getting the onboard NIC to work but I was able to overcome.
Now I needed to get back into my XP install to get some stuff done (play video games). I shut my computer down, pulled out Drive B, put Drive A back in and booted up. But I got a boot error message, and it looks like it's a Windows 7 Boot error message. How can this be if I removed the hard drive.
0xc000000e
The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible
It's almost as if my computer is trying to boot to Windows 7 even though I removed the hard drive containing the operating system. How do I get into my XP system? The drive is fine, I connected it as a slave and I can access the files on there. I'm guess Windows 7 makes some kind of change on the motherboard that forces it to boot to 7?
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Oct 19, 2012
My friend asked me to fix her laptop, which has been failing to boot, getting as far as the blue Windows 7 login screen then hanging. The login UI doesn't load, it's just the blue background.I tried to re-install Windows from the boot disc, but when I put in the disc, I wasn't able to boot from it. Instead the computer booted from the hard-drive again and hung at the same place. This is after changing the boot priority in the BIOS.Since the laptop is out of warranty, and is to all intents and purposes a brick, I removed the Hard-drive, and connected it to my computer to see if I could reformat the drive from there. The thing that has really puzzled me though, is that my computer wouldn't boot when this hard drive was attached, despite running fine before I attached the drive, and after I removed it.
Which leads me to think there's possibly a really malicious virus or something on the drive, which makes it the default boot device, despite having a corrupted operating system installed that won't boot.
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Mar 21, 2011
Ok I have a emachine e725 running windows 7 32bit and a acer running on windows vista. My emachine recently crashed in the blue screen and I tried to complete a system restore. I was able to get through the advanced boot menu and use the repair your computer option to restore windows. During the windows setup process I got another blue screen and the computer restarting. It then started the process over and once it got to the step that says windows is preparing setup, it gives an error msg saying something along the lines of windows was interupted and needs to restart to complete installation, and it has an option to press ok. This cycle continues and I can not open in safe mode because it says "windows can not complete the installation in safemode. Also the option to repair your computer in the advanced menu options is no longer available. So after wrestling with windows starting up I decided to create a back up and restore disc on my acer for my windows 7 computer. I tried putting it on a disc but it would not boot. So I tried creating a installation disc of windows 7 and tried booting from the cdrom drive. Once I did that I got a error msg saying "device driver not found: MSCD001 No valid cdrom device drivers selected. It then gives me the A:>. Im not sure if I created the disc wrong since I cant unzip the entire file I downloaded with needing an encryption password.
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Jul 2, 2012
I had my old hard drive installed in my Windows 7 computer. It worked for several months but now it started booting from the old drive that still has Windows Vista on it. My simple fix has been to unplug that drive while booting it up. Can I just delete the Windows Vista files?
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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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Feb 21, 2011
I have a laptop that has Vista installed on it. I have an upgrade disc for Windows 7 and I am thinking about performing a "clean installation" over the Vista OS - which I know is allowed, on the following link;click here Now, I would like to create another partition (on the same hard drive) and install Vista (using the same disc that it came with the laptop) onto that blank hard drive partition
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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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Aug 17, 2012
This week, I encountered the following strange problem for which I haven't found a final solution so far, though I have found some bandaids. But having a complete solution -or at least a reason why this problem occurs- would be great:I have a working installation of Windows 7 Professional x64 in UEFI mode. The main disk, SSD #1, contains the following partitions (using GPT): ESP, MSR, system, data. An additional disk, HD #2, with a single data partition (using MBR) is also attached to the system. With this setup, everything works fine.Now, after adding another disk, HD #3, to the system -my old system disk (bootable, using MBR, one active primary partition and an extend partition with three logical disks)- Windows will no longer boots completely: The boot process begins, the Windows logo is shown. Then, a message is shown in text mode "Windows is loading files" with a loading bar. After a while the boot process stops and I am dropped into the EFI shell. After removing the offending HD #3, Windows boots normally again.
I tried removing HD #2 and only attaching HD #3 together with SSD #1, but this yielded the same problem. Using SSD #1 by itself works fine though. Booting from a Linux live-cd works without problems. All disks and partitions are found and can be mounted. There, I erased the disk signature from the offending HD #3 and now Windows was able to boot and also found all disks and partitions correctly. But after a reboot the same problem reappeared
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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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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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Aug 1, 2012
My windows vista computer died. I have backed it up on and Iomega external hard drive but can't figure out how to restore the information to the new computer which is a windows 7.
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Nov 25, 2012
Whenever I power up my computer, my external hard drive does not always come on line. I have to unplug and replug it for it to come on line.
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Aug 3, 2011
I just got a new Packard bell go external hard drive which I used for a couple of days with no problem. btw it has never fell or had any physical damage. I plugged it one day into the PC and it couldn 't be detected in my computer. it shows up in devices and printers and also in disk management. I read on some forums to try and initialize it but it gives me an error saying cyclic redundancy check. I 've tried everything but still not working. this is a new hard drive which has never fell and no physical damage. and please don' t tell me to return it cos it was bought in another country. the only option right now is to fix it?
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May 3, 2011
Running Win 7 home, acer 1800.About a week ago I installed a Buffalo 1.5 TB external drive and automatic back up package, it was working very well, however it now shows as " Not Connected".I have replaced the usb lead but no change in status.It is also no showing up with other drives?Any one had this problem and found a fix?I did a search but found nothing quite like this.
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Apr 16, 2011
I have a 2TB Seagate hard drive that keeps dropping out in Windows 7. I use it as my main backup drive and when writing to it using either of the two backup apps I use the drive usually "disconnects" and I have to switch it off and on again to use it.I've tried using a different USB port and a different USB cable - same thing. I have run Windows 7 error-checking checking which reports no errors.When it disconnects, device manager shows that it is still connected and working but it definitely doesn't work. For instance, I can double click and open it but it shows no folders. Switching it off and then on fixes this but only temporarily.
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Mar 19, 2011
Whenever I try to eject a certain external hard drive using the little icon in the task window, I get a message that it is in use. I am very careful to be sure it is not in use but still get the message. This is a data storage disc. I am not aware of any programs on it that may be running in the background. Is there a way to examine a disc to see just what is being used on it at any given time?
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Nov 12, 2011
after plugging in the external hard drive after a while I get you need to format the disk in F:\ do you want to format?After a while throws another warning saying F: is not accessible, Data error (cyclic redundancy check)It was working well until last week but then suddenly started giving this error message.
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