Here is my problem: I dropped my laptop down the stairs *Tripped and fell*. Now the screen is shot, but the hard drive and everything still works. I have an adapter to plug the hard drive into and lug it into my usb port. I was wondering if there was a way to use it as a boot devise for another laptop via the usb? The hard drive is sata, and the working laptop is IDE, that is why I want to boot via the usb.
Depends on the laptop...check the bios menus to see if it has the option to boot from USB Hard Disk, there may also be a "hard disk boot priority" option, where you may see the drive. (plug the drive in before going to bios). Only issue is that Vista (I am assuming) is very picky about hardware changes...you may have to edit the BCD just to get to safe mode.
I tried this before with no success even thou my bios has the option to boot to usb. The biggest problem i had is that when i would install windows on the external drive and tried to boot it would fail. I found out some info that Windows does not support booting to usb so if you have windows already installed on the hdd and try to boot to it it will fail. So i thought that i would format the hdd and do a fresh install of windows on it the problem with this is that the install procedure does not detected a usb drive for install. After doing some research online i found a way to hack the install procedure for windows to detect a usb drive (which was pretty confusing) and i would keep getting so far in the install then would get an error and it would cancel. I even tried copy and pasteing it with no luck. Some people say that they got this to work but from what i have read most people can't. I know that this does not really help you any but just figured i would let you know my own experience with this. Good luck!!!!!
