Booting up from a previously internal hard drive

[healym15]

My laptop recently has stopped working. The hard drive was not damaged so I had that taken out. It is now connected to my other laptop via a USB adapter. I want to know if I can boot up from the hard drive connected by USB. Both hard drives have windows 7.

 

[rolli59]

Problem is that the drive came out of different machine and will have the drivers for that hardware. You can possibly do a repair on boot up or boot into safe mode with network and run win update.

 

[FALC0N]

I have only tried this once via usb and it failed. But the hardware differed substantially. So I wasn't surprised.

I have swapped out hard drives between somewhat similar setups with success.

 

[healym15]

Problem is that the drive came out of different machine and will have the drivers for that hardware. You can possibly do a repair on boot up or boot into safe mode with network and run win update.

If I were to run win update would i lose my data?

 

[rolli59]

No, but there is always a slim chance. If you are just doing this to save some data (documents pic and such) then you do not have to boot from the drive just read it over USB like a normal external drive.

 

[FALC0N]

Why do you wish to boot off of this drive? You could easily copy data off it as a slave via USB. Is there something in particular you cant recover without it being the boot drive?