Booting from an External M.2 Drive (which is the original boot drive) With a Laptop

[cuplessface]

So, i decided to finally switch to POP OS with my Acer Nitro 5 after watching LTT switched to Linux videos.

I just YOLO'd it and purchased a brand new m.2 drive and installed the os on it instead of using my old drive. Long story short, I was wondering if it is possible to simply put my original drive into an external enclosure and boot from it without doing any prep work?

[Wild Penquin]

Well, why not just try it out and see if it works?

 

Note: The keyword here is not "internal" or "external", but "removable" vs "non-removable". Some BIOSes might not allow booting from all (USB) drives, though.

 

It really depends on the UEFI implementation on the laptop BIOS and how the bootloader was configured on the OS you've installed and what is the default EFI binary on the external drives EFI partition. Typically, internal drives are configured slightly differently than external (removable) ones - however, most bootloaders on a typical Linux distribution will install themself into the default bootlaoder (too) if none exist there yet, and should work if the drive is started to be handled as a removable one.

 

For external (=removable) drivers, it makes no sense to make an UEFI entry in the NVRAM (obviously, since the drive is removable and could be used in any computers, and OTOH there is no guarantee it will be present on the next boot), and this is really the difference to non-removable ones. So the only EFI loader usable on removable drives is the default one (it could be a bootmanager which can start other EFI binaries). If your OS bootloader has installed itself as the default, it should work from an external drive. If it hasn't, then what typically needs to be done is to boot somehow into a Linux distribution and 1) make the NVRAM entries with efibootmgr (or similar) or 2) re-install the whole bootloader. If you do plan to indeed remove the drive, you should install the bootloader as the default EFI partition entry.

 

If you are booting a Windows, you are probably better of using it's tools. I'm not sure if Windowses can be installed on a removable drive easily, but I guess it should be possible.

 

But based on the information you have given it is impossible to give any definite answer for your case specifically. I can't actually make out which OS you are actually trying to boot from the external drive from your post. I.e. is it the original OS (Windows?) your laptop shipped with, some other Linux installation, or the Pop OS installation you are trying to boot?

Edited February 14, 2022 by Wild Penquin

[BondiBlue]

Yes, you should be able to boot from your original drive if you install it in an external enclosure. If you were running Windows then there shouldn't be any issues. macOS is fine with it as well, and Linux is usually fine with being moved between many different machines.