How to boot from an external harddrive (USB) with a laptop?
 

Does anyone know how to boot from an external harddrive (well really its an internal hard drive in an enclosure) thats connected by USB on a laptop? I dont think the drive is bootable so that is another issue.. the drive used to be in my desktop computer but it was not the primary drive containing the boot sector information. I took it out of my desktop and want to boot up my laptop with it (im travelling) :)

Anyone know what would be the easiest way to do this?
I have a Dell XPS M1530 laptop if that helps..

Hold down F12. Choose 'USB'. If that's not an option, press F2, go into the BIOS, and enable USB boot.

If the HD isn't bootable, it won't work.

I doubt Windows will work, anyhow, since it was setup for a different machine which likely has entirely different hardware.

Your best bet would be to connect the HD and use a ghost utility to back up the internal drive to the external.

Spot on here

you need to get a very secure server at a location you trust...

& then use your travel computers as dummy terminals for now on....connecting through secure layers/totally encrypted

i can point you in the right direction software wise

its these kind of threads i like to bookmark so i can learn from

What OS?

what he said

there is no way to make the drive itself bootable?