Laptop won't install from external hard drive that's confirmed working

shandopanda · Feb 9, 2014

Hey folks.

A friend convinced me to try linux on my laptop but I didn't like it and wanted to go back to windows so we set up my USB powered external hard drive to install windows 7 from. I checked it on another friends pc (which is running windows) and it worked fine. When we tried it on my laptop it didn't work. I set it to boot from my external hard drive but it just says "Operation system not found"

Any help on how to fix this would be welcome, I really need my laptop for college.

USAFRet · Feb 9, 2014

Just to confirm:
You're trying to install to the laptop internal drive, from a USB drive. Correct?

By what means did you put the Windows install files on the external drive?

s3anister · Feb 9, 2014

It's because booting from an external drive is going to look for an installed Operating System. For Windows 7 this would be Windows PE which is the pre-install environment for Windows 7 (basically a small OS to load the actual OS).

Now to install windows from your HD you need windows PE on the external drive and it's possible to do this but to be very honest with you it's easier to just setup an 8+GB flash drive to boot from with windows 7 on it.

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Laptop won't install from external hard drive that's confirmed working

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