External hard disk, bootable

dukeofurl

New Member
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2
A friend gave me an older Dell laptop, I installed Win 8.1 on it. This unit does not have a UEFI bios (that I can tell) however 8.1 runs great on it actually. The time came to back the unit up, I use Acronis True Image, and have an external WD Passport drive, and then acronis boots from a CD, and I connect the Passport via USB. Well, I had the idea to make the passport drive bootable, and boot the acronis disk, which is linux based. The older Dell will boot from USB, it boots from a flash drive just fine, but I can't get it to boot from the passport drive. I've tried several downloadable utilities to copy a .iso to a flash drive, and some of them only work if the .iso is a windows disc, some of them only work if it's a flash drive, and refuse to even see the passport disk. I finally found one that I thought would work, it said it was successful, but when I try to boot the older Dell from it, it says very quickly "no boot sector" or something like that.

So how can I make this external drive bootable?

thanks
 
Last edited:

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    7, 8.1, 8.1, 8.1
    Computer type
    Laptop
I am not sure that I fully understand what you have or are trying to do, but windows will not boot from a removable drive. It's a msoft issue.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    win8.1
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Acer V5
    CPU
    i5
    Memory
    6GB
    Hard Drives
    240GB Sandisk SSD
    Internet Speed
    4G/LTE
you would have to use bcdboot to add the boot files to the external drive...

Basicly create your Acronis Boot media - and copy all the files from the USB boot disk to the external drive..
the external drive should now boot as if a USB stick

And yes you can boot windows from an external source - either via an ISO file, a Wim file, a VHD / VHDX or a full windows version with win8.1 / 10
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 3.1 > Windows 10
    Computer type
    PC/Desktop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Dell XPS 8700
    CPU
    I7
    Memory
    24 GB
The Acronis disk comes as a .iso that is meant for me to burn to a CD, and it's Linux based. I just want to copy it to my Passport drive and boot my Windows PC from that, rather than burn the CD.
 
Last edited:

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    7, 8.1, 8.1, 8.1
    Computer type
    Laptop
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