Can I boot from an external storage?

[PopsnBurbles]

My desktop from almost a decade ago finally decided to pass on from this world. I opened it up and pulled out the HDD (3.5 inch SATA 640GB) and bought a HD enclosure and plugged it on my current laptop. I think it's basically acting like an external storage. Fortunately, I've been able to access most (if not all) of the files I had on my old desktop.

My problem is this...can I use my makeshift external storage to boot Vista?

- the storage already had Vista installed from when it was still in the old desktop.

- my current laptop uses Windows 7.1 SP1

- when I tried selecting the storage from the boot menu (F12 on restart/start-up), I only get a blue screen and a bunch of lines of white text appear and reboot to use the original Win7 settings.

- As it is now, the external storage is plugged via USB 2.0. The enclosure came with a SATA connection wire but I don't have any eSATA ports. Using any port inside my laptop wouldn't work out because I would literally take it apart to access them.

I am not tech savvy...I don't even overclock. I just use my computer to play games, surf the net, and watch videos.

[bmw1racer]

I think the reason why the external HDD won't boot on your laptop is that the laptop hardware is completely different... When you try to boot from the external HDD, it loads drivers that aren't compatible with the laptop, so it craps out.

Why do you need to boot into Vista anyways? If you can pull all of the files when using the HDD as an external drive, there's no need.

EDIT: Maybe try booting the HDD in Safe Mode (F8)... It should load only basic drivers which shouldn't cause a crash.

[PopsnBurbles]

Sorry I was not able to get back to this. Anyway, I'm intending to use Vista because some of the older stuff I play either do not run at all on Windows 7/8 computers or give me heaps of problems just to let them run.

I'll try the Safe Mode thing tonight.

[hongsc]

Try going into the BIOS and setting it to "boot from USB". I think that might fix your problem. You can boot from an external drive. I think think it's just a setting issue.