problematic step in installing windows 7 on external hard drive

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?

It is not worth the time trying to install Win7 to an external HD. USB is the bottleneck. Even if it installs it is too slow to bother with. Better to use internal or eSATA.

from my laptop's internal harddisk - it can boot.

but when i tried to boot this laptop from external hard drive, it would not. i suspect that something is wrong related to point 8 of the instructions How To Install Windows 7 On USB Flash Drive or External Hard Drive
which requires letter of the first active partition - i assume it is the partition of the source internal disk, not the destination external one. please correct me if i am wrong.



i hope it clarifies it.

For diagnostic purposes - to test two hard drives, and to gain access to data which is there.

Could someone please anwer my questions?

WarriorLite said:

For diagnostic purposes - to test two hard drives, and to gain access to data which is there.

Could someone please anwer my questions?

You use the Start up Repair CD/DVD for doing that, or softwate using WinPE3.

You can rescue data from Win7 installed internally, using the Win7 DVD or Repair CD to Copy & Paste - in Windows Recovery Console, or Paragon Rescue Kit Free Edition 11.0 Free CD.

We have already answered your question about installing Win7 to USB external HD. If you want a dialogue then discuss what we've posted, don't just ignore it and insist we answer your question we've just answered.