booting from external enclosure

[countrystyle]

I bought a vantec USB2/eSata enclosure and need to boot from it.

-it boots fine at home with an Intel mobo on USB2.0 (still have defective sandy bridge)
-it does NOT boot on 3 HP laptops of different models at work.
-it is not recognized at a bootable device in the bios either

-I have a Seagate freeAgent USB2.0 drive that boots find both at home and at work.

-other than that the drive works fine once windows is booted.

Vantec tech support was useless and had poor replies:
-like can this new HP laptop that you boot the other USB drive from have a boot from USB option?
-do you want to boot from an external drive?
-then finally said we don't advertise the drive as being bootable.

I have updated the bios on the laptops.
What could be the reasons the vantec drive is not booting on the HP latops?

I am hoping someone here can help or provide some insight to the reason it cannot boot.

thanks,

countryStyle

 

[Harvey]

1. Did you check the BIOS of the laptops to see if the external drive is recognized on boot up?

2. Did you hit F8, or whatever other key is specified to call up the boot menu?

3. Is the external drive self powered, or are you relying on power from the laptops' USB ports. Some hard drives require more current to spin up the motor, and some laptops don't provide enough current to start a hard drive reliably, especially on boot up.

Hope that helps.

 

[pete1229]

It's a Mobo thing, some bios give you the option of booting from USB ports while others simply do not. If you check your boot priority options and there no USB option, then it cannot be done. For example, I have an Asus M3N78-VM, I can list the bootable system image HD I have mounted in an external enclose as the primary boot device but since its connected via USB the MBR will not recognize it as bootable because the Mobo does not support that option.

 

[JackMDS]

As far as I know Windows can not Boot from USB.

 

[corkyg]

As far as I know Windows can not Boot from USB.

Correct! Booting from an external would open the door to untieing the OS to one machine. You can boot from externals, but you can't load Windows from them.

 

[countrystyle]

thanks for the responses so far.

There are more OSes out there than vanilla windows: Linux, Unix, Windows Server, Windows Server Hyper-V core (hyper-v core with windows inside. Yeah!). This is a hardware issue. I have no problems booting up at home.


Spin-up time: award for best educated guess! The external drive I can get to work (Seagate) requires a workaround to get it to boot. First I have to go into the bios (do nothing there) then back out to the boot up options and the Seagate is presented as a bootable drive (the nexstar is read as not bootable). The same workaround did not work for the nexstar, so, I concluded that this has to do with spin up. Does this sound right?


Vantec/Nextar technical support was BRUTAL! It is not worth paying a premium for their product based on that alone.


CountryStyle

 

[Harvey]

As far as I know Windows can not Boot from USB.

Yes, it can. As pete1229 said, as long as the motherboard and BIOS support it. I have worked on my own and several friends' laptops that would boot from various USB devices, and I have had mixed results from machine to machine.

While trying to rescue infected or corrupted machines, I've often tried to use an old DOS based version of Norton Ghost 7 to clone drives running XP before working on them. Some would boot to an external USB connected floppy while others would boot from a flash drive. Some would boot to both, and some wouldn't cooperate with the program.

In one case, the machine would recognize an external floppy and an external HD, but it would not allow booting from the floppy to clone the internal drive to the external HD. I had to remove the HD from that laptop and install it in my own laptop which allowed me to boot to DOS to clone the drive to another USB connected external drive. The original machine was then able to boot from the cloned external drive.

In general, I find newer machines are able to handle more kinds of external devices, probably because including the ablity to handle them wasn't a consideration when the older drives were manufactured.

 

[countrystyle]

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