Unable to Boot from External HDD

[TedBellLover]

I just used Acronis to image the 2.5 " HDD in my new Asus netbook. When I attempt to boot from the cloned drive (via external HDD enclosure and USB) it gets partway through loading Windows (as evidenced by the Windows logo and progress bar) then VERY rapidly displays the BSOD and loops to boot again. I'm pretty sure Acronis made a good image because it does the same thing with the factory HDD in an external enclosure, and needless to say the factory HDD works perfectly when mounted in the netbook. So, it seems the system disagrees somehow with a good HDD mounted in an enternal enclosure. At minimum I want to check the operation of the new image, and possibly boot from an external enclosure routinely, so I'd appreciate any help. Thank you in advance.

[Steve R Jones]

Did you remove the internal drive so that you don't have TWO C DRIVES?

What happens when you put the cloned drive in the internal spot - that would be the way to test the drive...

If you really run out of things to do you could look into the following - and keep in mind how terribly slow it is to run an OS off and external USB drive.


Fred Langa has an excellent, illustrated, step-by-step article on how to get a bootable, lightweight installation of XP onto a self-contained, zero-footprint, USB thumb or flash drive:

Langa Letter: XP On Your Thumb Drive
http://www.informationweek.com/wind...cleID=177102101


WinUSB is a tutorial which allows the user to run a complete Windows XP version on an USB device/stick.

http://www.winusb.de/index_en.html

[TedBellLover]

The cloned drive is 3.5" I know it's too big to go in the netbook. I'm betting it would work that way anyway and the trouble is with the USB connection.

[OS-Wiz]

Langa Letter: XP On Your Thumb Drive
http://www.informationweek.com/wind...cleID=177102101

Appears to be a restricted site???

[ua549]

You must go through the front door then access the article.

The article is interesting because it explains why XP won't boot from a USB drive without a workaround.

[OS-Wiz]

The cloned drive is 3.5" I know it's too big to go in the netbook. I'm betting it would work that way anyway and the trouble is with the USB connection.

Go into the BIOS and make sure the laptop is capable of booting from a removeable device (some aren't).

[cat5e]

I had a Laptop that its motheboard IDE interface gone and it could not use internal HD any more.

To make sure that it can boot from USB I tried first Ubunto ince it known to work from USB, and could boot from a from an external USB drive and use it.

But I use Windows, so I spent a lot of time on this issue to tyr to make it working with Windows.

Windows Boot Drive chipset's core drivers are not programmed to start from USB (both Intel and AMD).

I tried few of the work around that can be found on the Net (including some that are mentioned above). What these work around do is changing the drivers of the core chipset. None of them worked for me, my suspicion is that unless you have an exact match of the computer, chipset, and HD that the Work arounder used it would not work.

Microsoft made a USB loader available (few days ago) for putting the original installation media on flash drive so that Win 7 can be installed on Netbooks that do not have DVD. I did not look at it, but I doubt that it would help in making Yet another work around to actually run the computer from USB.