Windows 7 - External Harddrive

I purchased an external hard drive (WD Essential, 500gb) that is used exclusively to create Macrium Reflect images for three different computers.

Computers are:
HP Laptop with Vista
Dell Desktop with Vista
Computer I built with Windows 7 as the OS

When I plugged in the external hard drive to each computer, it trys to install the external software. This worked no problem with Win 7. With the other two computers it says the external hard drive was NOT installed properly. However, I can see the drive in windows explorer on all the computers. I had no problem creating Macrium Images for each computer with Macrium.

I can restore the images on the Win 7 and the Dell computers without any issues.

The HP Laptop is causing me a problem. When the external drive is connected, it will NOT boot. It hangs up very early in the boot process with Macrium Rescue Disk in the CDrom. Without the external drive connected it boots from the rescue disk. WD techies were no help to solve the issue.

I did extensive reseach to solve this issue and I was told to boot into the bios and change something (I never could find out what to change).

If anyone has a clue I can use the help. Thank you.

G'day Huffman,

I'm not sure if this will solve the problem, but with the BIOS setting......do you remember if you were told to look for an option called Legacy USB or something very similar to that?

The Legacy USB option is used to tell the computer, before any Windows drivers boot, that there is a USB keyboard and/or mouse connected to the computer. I wonder if that is what is required by your HP to "see" the WD Essentials USB drive? Can you have a look and see if you have that option in your BIOS, and let usknow whether it is turned "ON", or "OFF"?

Regards,
Golden

In BIOS settings, it could also be the Boot Order they want you to check.
If your laptop is set to boot from USB before the Optical Drive that would do it also.

Enter your BIOS Settings, navigate to the BOOT tab, and check/change that the Boot Order is CDROM first.