Hi, everyone. I bought a new and faster drive (7200 RPM) for my laptop and put it in an external enclosure with USB 3.0 connection (my laptop has 2 USB 3.0 ports as well). I want to do a clean install of Windows 8.1 (Pro) into this drive. I'm thinking about to creating a Win 8.1 bootable USB drive using Rufus software, in UEFI mode (and GPT partition).
I've been wondering: can you boot from this USB drive and install Windows into the external HDD? It's not that I'm lazy (not to much lol), but I need to perform some operations on the current HDD, and I don't want to swap the HDD just for installing Windows, because it takes some time to do that and I would have to swap it back anyway.
And before you ask, I don't want to use a disk cloning/ghosting software as I really want a fresh install, as I'm facing some bizarre issues with Windows lately, those ones usually only solved via formatting the partition or performing a clean install. Thanks in advance.
I've been wondering: can you boot from this USB drive and install Windows into the external HDD? It's not that I'm lazy (not to much lol), but I need to perform some operations on the current HDD, and I don't want to swap the HDD just for installing Windows, because it takes some time to do that and I would have to swap it back anyway.
And before you ask, I don't want to use a disk cloning/ghosting software as I really want a fresh install, as I'm facing some bizarre issues with Windows lately, those ones usually only solved via formatting the partition or performing a clean install. Thanks in advance.
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 8.1 Pro x64
- Computer type
- Laptop
- System Manufacturer/Model
- Dell Inspiron 15-5537
- CPU
- Intel core i5-4200U
- Memory
- 6 GB DDR3L 1600 MHz
- Graphics Card(s)
- AMD Radeon HD 8850M GDDR5 @ 8870M
- Sound Card
- Realtek HD ALC 269
- Screen Resolution
- 1366x768
- Hard Drives
- Seagate Momentus 7200.5 750422
- PSU
- 90-watt Dell AC Charger
- Keyboard
- Generic USB Multimedia Keyboard
- Mouse
- Genius Traveler 6000
- Internet Speed
- 15 Mb/s ADSL2+
- Browser
- Google Chrome
- Antivirus
- Avast Internet Security 2014