can you boot from an external hard drive

So the bios has to refer to the first boot device as the primary one! Normally this is on the primary hard drive and on the first partition (unless deliberatley put else where! This tells the OS where ,to find the required operating system on the hard drive. For any computer to bootup it must be able to find a 'boot' system. It seems to me that there is some confusion although perhaps this is now solved. I don't really know what the 'USB Legacy Support' is/does (perhaps a more educated member could tell us?) but as my already was in 'Auto' which is a sort of semi-on (software controlled is my guess), the difference can't be that huge from before I switched it fully on. I did get a small surprise during next start-up when Windows started to install drivers for my sound card, and later I had to change some settings in my sound card to get my microphone to work again, as the driver install had changed some settings there, but otherwise everything is just hunky dory. My BIOS did not, however, have this option, only Disk drives, HD:s, Network, and Floppy(?!), but here's the beauty:įind (in BIOS) the 'USB Legacy Support', make sure it is set to 'Enabled', and voilà, it should work like a charm to start-up with the external HD:s connected and on. But at last I found a solution that works, and it's simple (thank you to saykomatrixx):įirst (of course) you check your BIOS to see that USB-devices are below (after) internal HD:s in the boot sequence. Had the same problem, searched the Internet and found a million people with the same problem and a million helpful people and their 'solutions' to the problem, of which some did just not work, and some were downright dangerous to the health of my PC.

Can you boot from an external hard drive