Windows 7 on external HDD

I was just given the RC for Win7. I wanted to put it on an external hard drive for my laptop that internally runs vista. Can I run Win7 from the external HDD? Even if it's just for testing purposes?

 

If you can boot from your external HDD, you can. If not, you can't.

 

Can someone boot from a external HDD with a laptop running vista?

 

It's a function of your laptop, not the OS.

If you go into the laptop BIOS, do you have an option to boot from USB device?

 

XP never was able to boot from USB, even with compatable BIOS. Vista/win7 do no suffer from this problem.

 

My brother tried to install vista on a removable hardrive last week,wouldn't let him, said cant be installed on removable drive or external drive? I've never tried so it was news to me,guessing windows 7 will be the same.

 

If you have recovery disks for vista install win 7 in it's place, tho creating a backup image of vista would be better before overwriting,or setup an extended partition & dual boot or run win 7 on the external using a VPC, Use MSVPC 2007

 

yea, i have a option to boot from usb. What the scenario actually is, is I have win7 on my spare laptop harddrive that is also SATA. So, I want to enclose that and make it usb. So, if I do get the enclosure(which is another problem) can't I just plug it in and boot from it since it's already installed?

 

Problem with that is it's already got drivers for a different machine,the time it would take to sort that out isn't worth the effort in the end it's over to you,clean install would be my first choice so any reason that drive can't be put into the laptop instead & have win 7 reinstalled

 

use the free virtualbox and just run windows 7 from within vista. It's very easy to do.

 

its actually got the drivers for my current laptop because I used this laptop to install it on the spare HDD.