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Trying to boot from External USB drive

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Hi,

I performed a "Entire PC" backup to a 4.7 TB USB drive from my old computer in which the OS is Windows XP.

I want to boot up using this USB drive on my Asus I7 computer in order to use certain programs which will not run on Windows 7.

When I select the USB drive as the boot device, the computer just boots normally, ignoring the USB boot request and starts Windows 7 instead of the XP OS on the USB drive.

Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong?

Appreciate any help...

Mike B

 

 

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Michael, 

Microsoft impose restrictions on how Windows can be booted which prevent doing so from external USB drives, so what you are trying to do is not possible.

 

Michael,  perhaps an internal hard drive dock will be a solution in your case.  Makes it easy to swap drives in and out using your internal SATA connectors.  There are lots of differnt ones so do some research but check out this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc8oHtSqZms

 

Michael,

Kingwin have some products that might help...such as:

http://www.kingwin.com/satastorage/kf-1003-bk/

 

I did something you like wanted, as suggested by others, with two internal SSD drives, each one connected to internal SATA ports. USB and ESATA can't boot Windows 7. One SSD has programs and windows 7 and the other has programs and windows 10. I enabled boot from either drive in the BIOS. Then depressed F12 to pull up the boot options after restart. From there you select which OS and drive you want. It's fairly simple. SSDs made the process easier as they boot very very fast. After a few days and in the end I saw nothing with windows 10 that that offered any advantages for me and my uses, over windows 7, so I deleted the drive with Windows 10. In the end it may just be easier to get updated programs for Windows 7 that now only run on XP. I was there a few years ago and eventually did that. Also, there is a complicated way to install XP and Win 7 on the same drive but you need to do it properly, install in the right order, and have multiple partitions on the drive. I think you have to install all software from scratch to do that, as Acronis won't help. Not really sure. I once did that also a few years ago with XP and win 7 on the same 500GB HDD, but it was much more complicated getting it installed and working, than just using two internal drives with different OSs on them. If you do use a single drive, it's probably advantageous to include the win 7 100MB partiton in with the OS in a single partition. I once did that also and it works, but I've forgotten how I did that.

Thanks all for your help.

Am I correct in assuming that if I install a second SATA drive in my computer, I just need to copy the image file from the external USB drive that I used to copy "entire PC" to the new internal drive using standard copy procedures? And then select the new drive during boot?

This would start Win 98 just like from my old computer?

 

Thanks again,

MikeB

 

Micahel,

You would not copy the image file frome one drive to the other.  When you take a backup of a drive, it saves it and compresses it in prorprietary Acronis .tib format.  You would need to use your recovery media to "restore" the data back to the new drive.  

If you haven't done this before, check out these videos... 

 

02 - SunGod2009 - How to backup and restore using Acronis True image - YouTube

03 - Britec - How to Backup and Restore Your Windows - YouTube

04 - Britec - How To Restore Windows 10 from a System Image - YouTube

Michael, even if you restore your Windows 98 image to your SATA drive I would have doubts as to whether you would be able to boot this into Windows 98 as I doubt that that OS has the device drivers to recognise much of the hardware on your current system to know how to boot.  I don't think that SATA was around when Win 98 was out, the majority of drives from that time were PATA aka IDE.