external hard drive question.......?

Question

i am thinking about buying a external hard drive. i have 2 computers, i want to copy the hard drive of one computer (windows file and everything) onto the external drive. if i did this, would i be able to use the external drive, plug it into my other computer, and boot windows from the external drive? i want to put all my computer games from both pc's on the external drive, that way i can play the game on both pc's. will this work? if so are there any special things i need to do?

Answer 1

No, that wouldn't work.

While an external drive can hold all of your data files like movies, music, documents etc (if it's large enough) you need special software to migrate installed applications and games from one computer to another. Programs like ghost can backup everything including the windows registry to an external drive for later restoration if the hard drive fails, but only to the exact same machine (it violates the licensing agreement of the OS to restore an image to any other computer)

You need a program like PCmover to migrate everything rather than re-install from scratch. Link has been corrected.

Answer 2

You should be able to do this but check out the bios of the computer you will be using to boot the Hard drive from. Restart the computer, hold the F8 key and the bios screen should appear on some computers it is the F2 key, in the bios scroll down to boot options and see if USB booting is an option. If it is then you can set the hard drive as the boot device and set USB boot to 1 or priority in the bios so that you computer knows which hard drive to use for booting. As far as putting games from both computers on the hard drive it may be a little more complicated. Do the games run on the same operating system, using windows on both? Make sure that the games dont require special hardware or programs to run, for example if you need a video card with x specifications to run game A, and computer 1 has the requirement but computer 2 does not have the right videocard, and you try to play the game off the external harddrive using the hardware of computer 2, the game will have problems because the graphics card. Also there is no easy way to merge the programs/software installed on both computers, you will have to reinstall the software from one of the pcs all over again onto the hard drive. You will need to also make a installation of windows on your external hard drive prior to moving anything onto it, and make sure it is in NTSF format, look up "booting OS hard drive" from google.com.

Answer 3

Your external hard drive should show as an icon on your screen. Simply drag and drop everything you want on that drive. If you want to clear space on your machine's hard drive then don't forget to delete whatever you move onto the Lacie once you have checked that it has transferred successfully. If you want to start putting stuff directly on the Lacie then just specify it as the destination whenever you save something. You have a massive amount of capacity as it stands and I am unsure why you want to move stuff onto the Lacie, unless it is for reasons of backup, which is obviously a good idea. It's a shame you are not on a Mac, as you would then have, on Leopard, the fabulous Time Machine facility which will mean never losing anything ever again. If you don't think you are much good at computers make your next one a Mac - they are simpler, smarter, and cooler than a PC, and much easier to use. Vista is where Mac was about ten years ago.

Answer 4

Do you have an OS on each PC? If so, you don't need to copy every thing over, else you need an external HD with at least the capacity that your existing internal HD has. To boot from it, the BIOS on your PC has to support Boot from USB. Now keep in mind that it will not run as fast as an internal HD since the fastest a USB 2.2 port can read data is about 480 Mbps. This is slower than most internal HDs. You can still install the games to that HD, but you will need to at least set up sort cuts on the PC you didn't install from. Good luck.

Answer 5

it depends on your motherboards compatabily or else it wont boot, but yes, you can install windows on an extrenal drive, a easier route would just install the games on the extrenal because any mobo can run things off an extrenal once windows is booted, but only new ones will boot, as long as you have USB2.0 on both computers, you shouldnt have any problem installing games onto it.

Answer 6

This should be doable.

Try sifting through this:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx

or check out cnet.com's message boards