HDD won't boot through external enclosure but will boot on mobo

I bought a cheap HDD enclosure from ebay to use my laptop HDD as a portable OS, as the laptop is dying.

The HDD boots fine in the laptop but when connected through the enclosure to my PC or two laptops it gets to the point where the four windows blobs join on the bootscreen, briefly BSOD's and then reboots.

It will also boot into windows startup repair but is unable to repair anything or find a solution.

I have tried two of these enclosures so I am pretty sure it's an issue with them but if this is common then I imagine there is a fix of some kind?

Thanks in advance

Windows won't work like that, the drivers are different and you will face authentication/genuine issues even if you can boot.

You would need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go for that and that is Win8 Enterprise feature.

A bit unrelated but to install on a USB drive you can use [project] PWBoot <Latest version: 3.0.2> - Project forge - reboot.pro

But it won't even boot on the same laptop in the enclosure? I'll check out that to-go version though, thanks for the tip.

Enclosure is USB? It is possible USB drivers are used when booting from it and you don't have the correct ones enabled/installed.

Same thing happens (BSOD) when Windows was installed in one mode (IDE/SATA/RAID) and later changed to another one. You have to modify registry and in some cases install additional drivers to make it work.

Yes it's USB. I just tried booting up the drive on the laptop motherboard then plugging in a different drive to load the drivers for the adapter. The drivers loaded successfully but when I tried to boot up laptop through the same drive via the adapter afterwards it just crashed pretty much the same as before, though I never saw the bsod this time.

I think I might have to pack in this project and just get a new laptop to put the HDD in as it's the same price as windows enterprise! Thanks for your help.

itsabitsa129 said:

But it won't even boot on the same laptop in the enclosure? I'll check out that to-go version though, thanks for the tip.

No it won't.
But that Windows-To-Go things seems good to me. It has everything you need, it can even install new drivers (if it can find them) and adapt to the PC you run it on. It is designed to do that. And you can use it on any PC not just one or two.
The only bad part is that you need Windows 8 Enterprise edition for that. I believe it is not included in any other edition on Windows 8, but I might be wrong. I don't know if there's a way to get it.
But what I know is that it is not available at all on Windows 7 (sadly). Many people (including me) don't like Windows 8 (I find Windows 7 much better, I don't like the metro thing in 8 and the changes they made), but this is the only way you can use this feature. This feature is definitely a strong advantage, one they should have made long ago. It is very useful, you can even use it with a flashdrive (pendrive, thumb drive etc...) but of course, also with a hard drive.

Make sure you update to 8.1, it might be needed too.