Boot from an external SATA HDD

[drobertsobx]

Hi,

My old laptop died so I bought this HP Pavilion 17-e118dx on eBay. I also bought an external SATA HDD Dock for my HDD from the old laptop.

The old HDD had Win 10 64bit and Win 10 32bit as a dual boot.

My problem is I need windows 10 32bit.

After all day trying to get that disks 32 bit partition installed to a new partition on the new laptop,  I finally discovered the GPT Boot system isn't compatible with the MBR needed for win10 32bit.

I don't want to convert the existing partitions on the laptop to MBR (Seems to be the only option to dual boot with a clone) kinda a drastic fix at this point.

So I then moved to trying to boot the old drive via the USB connection.

I updated the BIOS with the latest version. In BIOS I selected to enable legacy.

I went through the approval process and it seems to be in legacy mode now.

I entered BIOS again and selected the  USB as the first Boot Item in both boot options.

No dice. I then tried the F9 but the USB option is not listed.

I have a program that will not run or install to Win 10 64bit so really need to get the old HDD to boot externally.

Any help would be appreciated to get the old HDD booting. I don't use it often (just for a few older clients that are still xp or 7) but when they call I have to get back into Win 10 32bit to work on those projects.

Don

[banhien]

@drobertsobx 

Please check the following article

              https://recoverit.wondershare.com/harddrive-errors/boot-from-external-hard-drive.html

Note: I have not tried that.

Regards.

[drobertsobx]

Weird that was the Link I first tried yesterday... That would have and did work work on my old MSI (Originally XP then upgraded to Windows 10 both 32 bit and 64 bit on a Intel Core DUO)  it had an almost identical BIOS.

The problem seems to be this GPT Boot thing, it just will not recognize the external drives on the USB.

Here are some pics of the Boot and BIOS

esc OptionsBIOS SettingsNo USB