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Help booting from external hard drive

post #1 of 5
9/26/04 at 11:16pm
Thread Starter 
I just recently bought an external hard drive and backed up my internal hard drive to it. I had to reformat the computer and I wanted to keep all of my files saved. Now I am trying to boot my computer from the external hard drive, but it doesn't seem to work. I have a dell inspiron 8600 and in the bios I selected usb storage device as the first boot option. For some reason, it is not finding it and is booting normally from the interal hard drive. Does anyone know what could be causing this?
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post #2 of 5
9/26/04 at 11:32pm
A few questions:

1. Did you format the drive to be bootable?
2. Did you set the partition to be active?
3. Did you just copy the files over to drive (like through Explorer), or did you do something like image the old drive to the new drive?
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post #3 of 5
9/26/04 at 11:39pm
Thread Starter 
I just used the program that came with the hard drive and copy my whole c drive over to the external drive.
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post #4 of 5
9/26/04 at 11:49pm
It probably didn't copy the boot sector or the MBR.

You'll probably need to get the hard drive to another computer, set it so it is the partition on it is active, and then put a boot sector on it.

Here are some links that may help:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;305595
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;119467
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;314058
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post #5 of 5
9/27/04 at 5:23pm
Or get a program like TrueImage to do it for you. Cloned my laptop HD and the cloned drive booted fine.
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