Cannot Boot External HDD?

HI.

I have Bought a USB 2.5" SATA HDD enclosure, to connect my old netbook HDD to my new laptop. Its all working when Booted from the Internal HDD in my laptop which is running win7 I can browse all the files of the external HDD as normal.

Windows XP is installed on the external HDD, so I decided i wanted to boot from that, I changed the boot priority, and the pc starts, the "hardware software may have changed" screen, and i select "start windows normally", The xp Loading screen appears for about a sceond then the screen goes black and the pc boots the internal hdd [i can tell this becuase win 7 loads].

Please help, I just want to boot from the external HDD.

Thanks.

 

The odds of getting an XP drive to boot in a different system than the one on which it was installed are slim to none. It can work but only if both systems have the same or very similar hardware. Otherwise the device drivers are just not going to match and the boot will fail.

Other than that the version of XP on the netbook is most likely OEM and illegal to boot on another system.

 

I got a Install disc with the netbook.

 

As Jaylach said, the Windows XP will refuse to boot, and that is it end of story, there is no legal way that I am aware of, and here is why.
Microsoft in their wisdom incorporated within their operating systems a recognition system so that when the BIOS hands over the computer operation to the operating system, the first thing the operating system checks for is, is the hardware set up exactly the same as when it was first installed. If it sees major changes, especially a different motherboard, it will shut down and refuse to boot straight away.
Microsoft incorporated this as part of their copyright strategy to prevent direct copies, as in copied straight off one computer, and being illegally installed on a different computer. One operating system per computer is their insistence and the license states this. Especially in the case of OEM installations of Windows, XP or otherwise.

Nev.

 

OH ok thanks.

 

IS there a way to install Ubuntu on the external HDD?.

Thanks

 

Hi again, first, may I ask why you would want to do this?

However, if any Linux system was already installed, there is a possibility it might boot from it as Linux isn't governed by the same licensing conditions being a free operating system.
However, to actually install it onto the external drive, I honestly don't know if it can be done. Possibly is the only answer I can give.
However, if you try, be aware that if it can install, it may first reformat the drive, therefore wiping everything that is now on it. So make sure you have at least copied all files and folders on it to your computer or indirectly to another external hard drive first before you go any further.

Nev.

 

OK thanks.

 

I'd like to Have only windows installed on the laptops HDD and only ubuntu on my external drive.

 

First, as Nev said, Any Linux Distro WILL format the drive as it is not going to use NTFS. While from what I understand Ubuntu can be made to run on NTFS it will not be happy about it. By default Ubuntu will use the ext3 file system but will be able to read/write to an NTFS drive/partition.

You might want to look at some other Linux Distros beofre getting to deep with Ubuntu. While not that long ago Ubuntu was the distro of choice it has recently fallen a bit out of favor. One that you may want to look at would be Slackware.
http://www.slackware.com/getslack/

I also do not recommend just grabbing and installing any Linux distro. What I would recommend would be to download and burn a few live Linux CD's. A live Linux CD is a bootable CD that includes the Linux OS. It is fully operational and having a few will allow you to compare and decide which is best for you. Once you decide most live CD's will include an installer. Whether or not you can install to an external drive will depend on whether your system can boot from a USB drive. Here are instructions.
http://www.ehow.com/how_6822541_install-linux-external-usb-drive.html

Another option that you might consider would be to run a dual boot on the main system. The ability to do this would depend greatly on the size of the hard drive. It would have to be large enough to hold both Windows, your data and Linux. My data partition is about 290gig, considering that to dual boot either Windows 7 or 8 along with Linux I'd want at least a 640gig drive. I pulled a 640gig drive out of my laptop and replaced with a 1TB drive to dual boot between Windows 7 and 8 but you, most likely, won't need as large of a drive as, to be perfectly honest, you probably won't do all that much with Linux.