Solved Laptops work with no HD?

[nichos]

Please note that I posted this in W10 forums by mistake...........

If I disconnect the HD from my PC it does not start.

But my wife's old Compaq Laptop, provided is powered on mains it works OK with the HD removed.

And the 3 partiotions I made originally on the HD are still visible & contain all the files.

The properties of its C:/ main partition show 145GBs.

How does it work without the HD where presumably I installed Win 8.1 & all the other programs & files.

And the same with my old Acer notebook.

 

[strollin]

Perhaps the laptops that work actually have 2 HDDs or maybe 1 HDD and 1 SSD. Regardless, a computer can't work without some sort of boot device which is generally an HDD.

In the very early days of PCs, IBM computers had BASIC in ROM so if it couldn't find an OS to boot, it would load BASIC and you could write and run BASIC programs without an OS.

 

[nichos]

SOLVED

Many thanx .......nick