Suggestion - Regular swapping of hard drives on laptop?

Question

I have a pretty nice laptop that I use for business and it has software related to it.

My kids have some games that they have been wanting to play. Rather then purchase a new computer, I thought I could just buy another hard drive, load an OS, install games.

When the kids want to play games, I would just swap my business hard drive for their games hard drive.

Is this the best way of doing this or is it possible to connect an external hard drive via usb and boot from it rather then the internal drive?

Thank you

Answer 1

You probably can't boot from an external hard drive because the USB drivers that communicate with the external drive aren't present until Windows loads. However, with Windows up and running install the game but choose the external hard drive as the destination when the install asks you. There will be registry entries for the game on the regular drive but 99% of the game files will be on the external drive. Its worth a try.

Next day: Some laptops do have a hard drive that can be fairly easily swapped. My Dell has a hard drive that plugs in the side and is pretty easy to change out. If yours is easy to swap you could make an exact copy of your hard drive to a new one then remove sensitive data. You might have a problem with Windows on the second drive because it keeps track of hardware changes and sometimes won't run if it suspects illiegal copying. It will be a challlenge but might be doable. Good luck!

Answer 2

I don't recommend swapping drives because it is to much work, especially on a laptop.

You MIGHT be able to set your BIOS to start from "removeable media" or an external HD. It depends on HOW it identifies the drive and the BIOS itself.

The BIOS has basic USB drivers BUILT-IN that should come up BEFORE windows boots, IF it can boot from an external drive.

Set the BIOS to try the EXTERNAL drive BEFORE the internal drive. This way, IF the "kids" drive is plugged in, it will supply the boot information because it is accessed first!!

I think the BIGGEST problem is going to be getting the OS loaded on the external drive.
The only way I can think is to DISABLE the internal drive in the BIOS, Plug in the external drive, (with BIOS set to boot from the CD,) and then load the OS to the External drive.

NOTE: If you can NOT disable the internal HD then you have a problem! (Some BIOS's won't let you disable the Internal HD.)

If it works, REMEMBER to SECURE ALL YOUR FILES so the kids can't get into them, as the internal drive WILL be accessible AFTER the BOOT!!

Answer 3

That's a really interesting idea. This may not be an answer; but if you decide to go that path I'd like to know how that goes.