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Make external HDD bootable without formatting

Tags:
  • Formatting
  • Hard Drives
  • Windows 8
  • External Hard Drive
Last response: in Windows 8
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May 13, 2014 11:48:16 PM

I have been searching the internet ruthlessly trying to find the answer to this.

Heres my dilemma: I have a 1tb hdd of a single partition with 500gb or so of data I do not want to remove and have no means of backing up. I have the iso of windows 8 and would like to, on a brand new build, boot from the hdd without formatting the drive.

Now, ive been reading around and all I can find is that its impossible to do this without completely wiping the drive. Now ive also been reading that you can very easily create new partitions on a drive by simply using the disk management tool in windows. Can I not just create a new partition on the drive, say, 10gb , and make this volume bootable with winfows 8 whilst keeping all my data intact on the original volume?

Any help would be appreciated!
I can just pick up a dvd real quick to burn to if this is not possible.

More about : make external hdd bootable formatting

May 13, 2014 11:56:22 PM

Why would you need to wipe the drive? I'm missing something here.

Whether you can boot from an external drive depends on your mother board.
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May 14, 2014 12:11:32 AM

If i can simply extract the windows 8 files into the root of the drive along with the other files then my issue is solved... I have an asus p9x79le motherboard
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May 14, 2014 7:57:49 PM

Should be recent enough to support boot from USB.

If there is data on the drive it shouldn't matter. You should be able to tell windows to install to X:\ and it shouldn't wipe everything. It should just install. I'm not sure windows will install to a USB drive. I've never tried.
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