Also hard drive?

Question

Can I use an external hard drive instead of the internal by switching boot device in BIOS.

Answer 1

you can select the order in which your PC checks drives for an operating system, Is your external drive USB?? You need to set up booting from USB again this will be in the BIOS.

Answer 2

Yes, you can boot from usb. But you'll need to enter in the bios configuration (at startup press f2, f10 or esc - depending on your bios manufacturer - though usually esc work sfor most computers). Set the boot form usb device to enable then set the usb device as the first boot device.

Of course you'll have to have a relatively new computer to be able to do that. older computer modelsa don't support this function.

As the last advice, be sure you have a usb 2.0 compliant motherboard and an usb 2.0 external drive otherwise it will take forever to boot up and the system's performance will be severely affected. Moreover, keep in mind that an usb external drive can't be as fast as an internal hard drive and even on usb 2.0 the overall speed of the system will be smaller than when using an internal hdd.

Answer 3

Depends on your motherboard and BIOS.

I've got an Asus A8n SLI deluxe and it allows me to press F8 during startup. This then shows a boot menu listing all attached bootable devices, Hard Drives, RAID arrays, CD's and USB devices, and as long as I have bootable media in the selected drive it will load from there.

Answer 4

You can boot from an external USB device, but I think that if you're planning to install Windows on it, it will not work.

You'll need extra software, such as PE Builder. Look at the article below.

Good luck!

Answer 5

I haven't seen a BIOS that allows boot from USB,,not saying there aren't any. Just haven't seen one(BIOS).