problematic step in installing windows 7 on external hard drive

that's right, it was point 8, where you input the target partition at that moment. Very unusual it would be C, contrary to what they suggested.

I have found another way, though. I put hiren's boot cd on a usb pendrive which gave me a kind of dos explorer. it appears that in dos, or at least in this tool, all the file and folder structure remains plain and clear!!

Therefore, I am now copying all the stuff from the faulty drives to the external hdd and once that is done, i will do all the error checking. it appears that three of my five old disks have errors, and the motherboard seems functional.

In case someone finds himself in a similar situation.

Thank you.

WarriorLite said:

Hi everybody!!

I am trying to instal windows 7 on external hard drive following How To Install Windows 7 On USB Flash Drive or External Hard Drive

the boot from this drive did not work and I have a suspicion what the problem could be.

when i have to indicate the first active partition,whichis in point 8 of hte instructions, i am not usre what to do.

on my laptop, the first active partition is reserved 100mb one, which has no letter assigned, so I cannot give it as the answer. to make things worse, partition c on my laptop is inactive. and even when i used paragon hard disk manager to make the reserved letterless one inactive and c active, upon next restart the situation got back to the original.

supposedly, this messes up the installlation data.

how can i solve this problem?

I'm sorry, but I'm missing what this is supposed to help with? You needed to rescue files off of unbootable Win7? If so why would you not ask us to help you repair Win7 instead of absurdly reinstall it on an external HD?

Here is everything that can be done Troubleshooting Windows 7 Failure to Start.

Since you've messed with the disk configuration you first need to confirm Win7 or it's 100mb System Reserved partition is still Partition Marked Active then run Startup Repair - Run up to 3 Separate Times. Report back these results which will tell us a lot.