Booting External HD 1

[hoth17]

Yesterday I bought a My Book 250GB external HD. My plan was to copy my current hard drive to the external, then boot the HD on my friends laptop. Or run a Linux or different operating system on the external HD and dual boot on my PC. Since i bought it I've been searching online for a way to boot an external HD, but i haven't found one. If booting a external HD is not possible it would be nice to know so i do not have to keep wasteing my time looking online.
I have a Dell Dimension E510 3GHz 1GB of Ram Media Center SP2

 

[micker377]

You would need a computer with a BIOS capable of being bootable from an external source. The boot preference must be available before any programs are read by the system. Not even all new computers are bootable from a "Thumb Drive"! Look at the "boot" choices in the BIOS setup screen. If you can't find anything there, contact support for your computer.

 

[hoth17]

Just to make sure i understand you, my bios says i am able to boot from the usb, but it wont let me boot from the external. So, does that mean i am not able to boot my external HD. Do you mean the option on my bios literally say "external"? And am i right that it is not possible to change the bios on a pc? One, last question, when i try to copy files from a mac it will just say "The iteam could not be moved because "MY BOOK (my HD)" cannot be modifed." Any ideas on why i am not able to use the HD on macs?
Thanks for the input!

 

[wolluf]

What happens when you try to boot from the external drive? What exactly does your bios display in the boot choices?
If it can boot from external usb drive, there does of course need to be a bootable operating system on said drive. And that operating system should really have been installed on the external drive when it was connected to the machine you are booting (otherwise it may not boot at all - as different hardware). If you've just 'copied' an existing one to it, how did you do this?

Why do you want to boot the external drive on friends laptop? (like what's the advantage over using the operating system on the laptiop and accessing the external drive in the normal way?)

On the mac question - I'd gues sit doesn't have the ability to write to the filestore type on the external drive (is it ntfs or fat32?)