windows boot option

[Badger1bear]

Hi guys, one for the techy boys out there. I bought a solid state drive in the sales with an external case which plugs in via USB. I cloned my original drive onto the external drive no problem. If I hit f2 when she starts up I can get into the settings, drop down to the boot options and click on anything thats says USB in the sentence. I disable the master hard drive and the slave and go for restart (saving changes as I exit) It goes thru the POST and then chirps up that i need to hit f2 because it cannot go any further ?

I am at a loss now because I would of assumed that the usb drive would of become bootable from cloning the master ?


Any Ideas ?

 

[Kayos]

You will need to install the drive to make it bootable, booting an install from USB is possible (done it under Linux on a tiny server) but not as simple as cloning an existing drive

 

[gaz1]

You need to remove the HDD from the external case and connect it via SATA, internally. Windows doesn't support booting from USB drives.

when cloning and reinstalling back onto another hard drive we use the boot cd/boot usb to point to the software but once cloned its swap out the drives its also the same when you use an image of a hard drive include everything including boot sector otherwise it wont boot