Booting from an External Hard Drive

Okay I'm an IT student, for one of my classes we are required to have Windows Server 2003 installed on an internal hard drive. So I have it installed on my Western Digital 500GB internal hard drive. The way we work on it in class is we have the hard drive in a removable hard disk tray and just slide it into the computer and it's good to go. However the problem is; I primarily use laptops at home. So I decided to buy one of these a usb to sata cable. I can access the the contents of the drive but when i try to put into it, it splash loading screen, then you guessed it I get the blue screen of death. How do I bypass this little dilemma I have? I have tried booting from the hard drive on both my Dell XPS and old HP PC. Also my main computer which is my Macbook Pro is there a way I can boot from an external hard drive. Or how about even accessing the bios if there is one. Though I have a feeling the bios is the screen that pops up when you hold down the option key while booting.

 

A member, zfactor, has a How-To on making a bootable USB stick - that should be close enough to your external drive that zfactor's guide might provide some useful insights.

 

I don’t think you can make use that Windows installation on two computers, because the hardware configuration (hence drivers) don’t match. Even if you manage to make the HDD bootable, Windows will still crash at startup (most likely a bluescreen).

You mean you get a blue screen when you try to copy new files on to the hard disk when connected as an external USB mass storage device?

 

hmmm okay I might give the bios flash. Also I heard that windows is bootable over esata. So hypothetically speaking with an esata express card connecting to a sata hard drive would that be bootable. Or is it still like usb where it's not bootable?

 

usb is definately not bootable unless you edit the OS install iso file. esata is bootable, however most expresscard slots use a usb instead of pci based bus, which means it will probably still not work. Laptops with integrated esata will probably work.

 

Booting the hard drive is not the only problem; even if you manage to get the HDD bootable you cannot just boot up the Windows copy that is already installed. It will crash with a blue screen, because the devices in your laptop and those in the computer at your class are different. You * might* be able to repair the OS using the installation disk (repair install or manually change drivers from teh safemode), but you will have to do that every time you change the PC i.e : from your notebook to your class.