I did a search as well as scanned the sticky thread but couldn’t find an answer to exactly what I’m looking for here.
I have two fully functional hard drives that I salvaged from two old computers (one NB, one DT). They have bought-and-paid-for Windows 2000 as well as Microsoft Office on them.
I’ve got the hardware to access them from my current NB as external storage units, but of course I boot the current computer’s current OS.
Question is, with my moderate technical abilities, could I boot from the external hard drive? Failing that, could I just run my old versions of Microsoft Office? I vaguely grasp that there may be some problematic issue with [Dr. Evil air finger quotes here] “registry keys” [/deafqh], but that’s as far as my understanding goes.
As for why I want to do this: it’s my wife’s NB computer, and it runs Windows Vista/Office 2007–in Chinese. I really miss my old computers.
A quick Googling seems to be saying that Windows doesn’t support booting from an external drive. So you might need to create a partition, or add a second internal drive to your computer.
La Cie sells an eSATA drive that can be used to externally boot Windows, and I found several instances where people did so with PCs, but they used eSATA interfaces installed in their PCI slots. (And they specifically mentioned being able to boot Wintel PCs from these drives using Windows XP and 2000). I didn’t find any instance of people using eSATA interfaces installed in PCMCIA slots, but La Cie’s page specifically mentions that they sell a PCMCIA eSATA adapter, so I assume that would work (if your laptop has a PCMCIA slot). I didn’t find anyone claiming to externally boot Vista; that might be the result of some DRM in Vista or my inability to use the right words in Google.
If you get a cheap desktop tower (astonishingly inexpensive on eBay), you can install a removable hard drive bay, attach that to the internal IDE controller and just slap either of your drives into a drive sled and boot from there. I do that for a cheap-o Compaq box I have, but that was because I wanted to have physically separate drives for Linux & XP. I use a cheap (plastic), removeable drive bay/sled kit from Fry’s which cost something like $30 for the bay and $10 each for my sleds. They have more expensive aluminum enclosures that cost more (but still less than $100).
We have some laptops at work that have removable drive bays that we use for multiple booting (Windows 2000), but IIRC the IT people said they had some difficulty finding laptops with removable bays, which were more available when laptops were thicker.
Forgot to add: I moved the original IDE drive that came with my Compaq into the removable sled; if you put one of your drives into a new DT tower, you might have to call MS for a new license code.
What was wrong with your two older computers? If you can get them back up and running in some fashion, I’d recommend migrating your older computers from physical to virtual and run them in Virtual PC or VMWare Player sessions on the new notebook. I haven’t gone though all the steps yet, but this might be an option for you.
I think the OP is asking if s/he can boot the existing installed OS with the existing installed apps (Office, specifically) so that so s/he can basically choose to log in to the old “computer” and run Office that is installed on the old hard drive under the old Windows so that a new copy of Office does not need to be installed on the new machine (because perhaps the old licenses for Office are missing).
Is that what you’re asking, Koxinga? If it is…Aestivalis is right. An old hard drive does not a second computer make. You’d be best off setting up your actual old computer with the actual old hard drive in it and using VNC to access it as a “virtual desktop” on which Office is run.
ZipperJJ, I typically take that approach, leaving my old machine down in the basement to run processes while I’m away from home, and only connecting to it via Remote Desktop Protocol. However, I was considering moving that older PC to a virtual machine on my newer desktop upstairs, but I had problems getting VMWare Converter to work properly. Since then, I’ve had to replace the motherboard, and in doing so I stripped off a lot of the old software that may have been conflicting. I’ll give it another shot tonight, if only to give it more than the 256MB that the replacement motherboard had.
I’m almost positive you can. It has to do whether or not the BIOS will allow a USB, Firewire, or eSATA connection first priority in the boot sequence. If it does, and it sees on OS on that drive, it should boot from it.
Well, at any rate, even if Windows can’t, I know several varieties of Linux can.
It’s a bit more involved than that. Even if you have BIOS support for external boot priority the full XP OS in standard config does not usually want to boot from external USB drives (eSATA and FW scenarios may be different). The links I posted above are basically hacks to get around that limitation.
IIRC there is/was an issue with USB addressing re the USB bus being re-scanned every time a new device is plugged in that can give Windows XP a real bellyache if the OS binaries are sitting on an external USB drive.
I saw that but ignored it since the OP said, “with my moderate technical abilities.” I wouldn’t recommend trying it short of having a computer sitting around that you’re fine to trash.
I used to run 98se on an old tower. It was my main computer. I finally went to XP-Pro on a new machine. It has SATA “C” drive. I added my old 98se drive as a slave on the same IDE ribbonas my DVD ROM. The XP OS detects it just fine. I can write to it and read from it, run the apps, including my great old MS Word 97 program. I just made a shortcut icon om my desktop to it and double click and bingo, WORD ready to serve and protect. I does throw up a warning window that says, “The Windows registry has reported that one or more files are damaged or missing. to correct this problem, run the Word Setup program.” Below that is an ‘OK’ button. I click the OK button and WORD launches and works just fine. Do not try to reinstall on the XP “C” drive… Bad stuff happens… Just use from there. Works good. the hard drive can be mounted any place, just has to be able to hook to the IDE ribbon…
No need to start the 98se OS at all. In fact I have it blocked in the BIOS because sometimes there is a hic-up and it tries to boot and the hardware is all wrong.
I can still put it in the old tower and it runs just fine. Only thing that has to be changed is the jumper from ‘master’ to ‘slave’…
YMMV
*::: edit cause I can’t type or spell or anything. :: sigh :: *
Having spent a few days researching this, I found it possible, though not completely trivial, to move a complete operating system from an old hard drive to a virtual machine on a new Windows desktop/laptop using free and generally available software. Assuming you have enough space on your new hard drive, you can:
Create a Virtual machine (using free tools online such as EasyVMX) large enough to hold your old hard drive.
Load the new virtual machine in VMWare Player, then partition and format the drive on that machine with your tool of choice (a Windows CD, BartPE disk, etc.).
Shut down the virtual machine and mount it as a drive letter in your new computer using vmware-mount.
Restore the snapshot that you took in step 1 to the virtual machine that you created, and unmount it.
Start it back up in VMWare, and you should be golden! It might be possible that you may need to run a Physical to Virtual tool, but one is available as a plug-in to BartPE (http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/?page_id=174).
There are many caveats to this process, but in theory it’s possible with minimal investment. I can see potential for a small cottage industry to service people who can’t give up their old apps, but whose old computers won’t run anymore.
Booting windows from USB is not a fun process. I was able to get my EEEPC to boot from an SD card, but it took a lot of patience, research and a bit of tech-savvy.
