Booting from an external USB drive

Question

I have a new D630 that I'm using to replace my older D600. I like the setup I had on the D600 so I want to keep the hard drive in an external USB/Firewire case and boot from it when I need to access drives and code that I had but without cloning the drive to my D630.

I reset the boot options, moved the USB drive to first on the boot list and it attempted to boot from it. Blue screen of death... haven't seen that in a while.

The external drive is Parallel ATA using USB and the new D630 is SATA. I'm thinking it shouldn't make a difference unless the BIOS is expecting it.

Does anyone have thoughts on what I should be looking at?

lothar99 · Answer

Sure, that's understandable.  However, there has to be a option other than reformating the external drive.  How about bring up the system on the internal drive, connecting the external drive, loading XP on the CDROM drive and attempting to upgrade the external drive with the drivers necessary to run a D630?

ejn63 · Answer

Whether internal or external, you cannot take a Windows install from a D600 and move it to a D630. You can boot an external drive but as you would need to do with an internal drive, you must format and reload Windows onto the drive AFTER you connect it to the D600. The drivers required by the newer system are completely different - you're basically trying to put an old Chevy engine in your new Lexus -- it just won't work.

ejn63 · Answer

Windows has to be running on the target disc to load drivers onto it - sorry, that will not work.

Storage, Drives & Media

Booting from an external USB drive

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