Unable to Boot off External Drive

[Mashkal]

I recently swapped out my laptop hard drive for an SSD and installed a clean copy of windows 10 onto it. I kept the old drive and put it in an enclosure. The SSD works fine, but I would like to be able to boot from the external drive, which still has all of the original files.

 

When I try to boot off the external drive, I get the Windows 10 startup repair screen. Selecting "boot from EFI USB" restarts the computer, only to go into the same repair screen.

Any advice?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Windows won't let you boot from external volumes normally

 

Just copy the files off the external hdd.

[emosun]

the installation is assuming the drive is still installed in the same place it was previously , which it isn't. 

So either reinstall the drive or re install windows

[Mashkal]

Ok, thanks for letting me know. I was hoping that I wouldn't have to reinstall all of my programs, but I guess that's impossible then.

[RAM555789]

Should be able to boot, from your old drive. I have 3 boot options of windows on 2 drives (mistakes were made, and I'm too lazy to fix them) and I can boot from any of them.

[Mashkal]

9 hours ago, RAM555789 said:

Should be able to boot, from your old drive. I have 3 boot options of windows on 2 drives (mistakes were made, and I'm too lazy to fix them) and I can boot from any of them.

Can you tell me how to do that? I heard that there are some registry tweaks that can be done to make windows think that the external drive is internal. Is that what you're talking about?

[RAM555789]

2 hours ago, Mashkal said:

Can you tell me how to do that? I heard that there are some registry tweaks that can be done to make windows think that the external drive is internal. Is that what you're talking about?

I mixed it up. I have windows installed on both drives, it just remembers the USB I installed windows from but a quick google search would help you find the answer to your external drive issue. https://www.wikihow.com/Boot-from-an-External-Hard-Drive

[Mashkal]

11 hours ago, RAM555789 said:

I mixed it up. I have windows installed on both drives, it just remembers the USB I installed windows from but a quick google search would help you find the answer to your external drive issue. https://www.wikihow.com/Boot-from-an-External-Hard-Drive

Following that procedure just leads to the same problem that I described in the OP.

[ZacoAttaco]

If you boot from the SSD, does the external drive not appear? Can you not then move files across? Another suggestion would be a USB bootable Linux distro but I'm not sure how useful that would be for you.

 

You could also make the SSD the external storage and reinsert HDD, move what you need to move and then remove it and continue using it as an external HDD.

[Mashkal]

3 hours ago, ZacoAttaco said:

If you boot from the SSD, does the external drive not appear? Can you not then move files across? Another suggestion would be a USB bootable Linux distro but I'm not sure how useful that would be for you.

 

You could also make the SSD the external storage and reinsert HDD, move what you need to move and then remove it and continue using it as an external HDD.

The HDD works just fine; I just want to run some of the programs installed on the drive.

[ZacoAttaco]

Ok I don't know if something like this is helpful because I know you've already installed Windows:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3185777/windows/how-to-install-windows-on-an-external-drive.html

 

It's possible that the BCD, or Boot Configuration Data has been muddled when you installed Windows on the SSD. Sometimes you actually need to go into the BIOS and boot from a different drive to boot into the correct drive, if that makes sense.

 

You install Windows on Drive 1

Drive 2 is plugged in and running at the same time.

In some cases, you need to go into the BIOS, select boot Drive 2, to actually boot into Drive 1.

 

I'm not sure if any of this is helpful or relates to your situation.

 

So my suggestion, would be to go into the BIOS and select different boot options and see if one will boot into the external HDD.

[Mashkal]

Well, I didn't end up booting off of the external drive. But, I did manage to run some programs directly off the drive, so.. mission  partly accomplished.