Hardware Question…

[JohnMotylJr]

In theory this seems possible but i have no idea, what do you think?

Scenario: I upgraded hard drives in my laptop a while ago and now i have two. I recently put my old one back in and did a clean install that i will be dedicating to only school and work related stuff (mainly just a work environment). So i have two laptop hard drives. I have an old adapter that conveniently fits on a hard drive to plug in to USB. Is it possible to setup my BIOS to boot from external hard drive and boot my now external (old) hard drive with my current hard drive still in my comp?

I only ask because in theory it seems that it would work but i just don’t want to chance blowing anything up or causing problems that could have been avoided.

[Anonymous]

Yes. You will need to press F2/F12 or something similar when your BIOS starts. One of the options will be boot order. Generally you can cycle through a sequence the laptop should go through in finding somewhere to boot from. I normally put the internal hard drive last, since if there is something bootable attached, I probably want it to be used.

[JohnMotylJr]

@BenWalker

Hey, thanks for the reply. I did test this and it didnt work as i had planned. It started and tried resuming windows than a blue screen saying something about memory dumping but i than just put the hdd in the comp and turned on and no issues. I think the reason behind that is because i was trying to boot a system that was never completely shut down (my bad).

I put my boot order as External, HDD, and cd.

[chrisburton]

Just curious, why not use the extra Hard Drives as externals for storing your school/work projects instead?

[Anonymous]

There shouldn’t really be a difference between booting it using the internal and external connection. Have you tried it externally since? Does the memory dump happen every time? Your boot order looks fine, although I have cd before HDD, since if I have a bootable disk inserted I probably want to boot it.

[Author]

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