Windows 10: Boot and Run Windows 7 (external drive) in Windows 10

Hello,

I had an older Win 7 machine which started to experience hardware issues (Asus motherboard). I removed the hard drive hoping to be able to boot from it on a new computer Win 10. I put it in a hard drive Esata to USB3 case. I changed to boot sequence to Legacy device it bombs while trying to boot (Start Windows Normally). When I try to do the recovery option I can no longer use my mouse or keyboard so it's stuck at the "Choose keyboard Language" screen. I have programs that I want to run from this external (old internal) drive.


I understand there may be config issues, I tried to install Win 10 on the drive while in the old machine and as an external, both failed.

I don't want to format the drive and lose the apps, I tried to use WinToUSB, but it wanted to format and repartition.


Any advise, thanks.

:)

 

Windows 7 booting off wrong drive?!?!?

Please move if this is in the wrong place.

I have two hard drives, a 1.5TB drive, and a 160GB drive. Windows is installed on the 1.5TB drive, as are all my files and programs. The 160GB drive has a bunch of old files, and apparently the bootmgr and boot folder. Nothing else is on the 160GB drive, other than media files etc.

If I remove the 160GB drive from the machine, windows refuses to boot, plug it back in, it works fine. The setup with two hard drives I have now is temporary, as the 160GB drive will go into another machine.

My question is, can someone give me a step by step on how to make windows force to boot off the 1.5TB drive, ignoring the 160GB drive in the boot process completely?
I don't know how to do this in Windows 7, on XP I would just run the /fixmbr command and its related ones.

Any help would be appreciated.

Note: I would really really rather not have to wipe and reinstall, I know it can be done without one as I've had this issue with XP before.

 

Windows 10 boot drive

Is Windows 10 also limited to a max of 3Tb for a boot drive?

 

windows 10 slow boot

I was having a slow boot issue on my Windows 7 install a little while back. It would take about 30 - 40 extra seconds to boot up for whatever reason.

I would try following these steps, while this didn't solve my issue, it did increase Read/Write to where it should be.

http://www.disk-partition.com/kb/tips-ssd-optimization-windows7-1.html

Looks to be similar to this: https://www.back2gaming.com/focus-story/ssd-optimization-for-windows-10-windows-8-and-8-1/


In the end, I had to reinstall my Windows 7 entirely to fix the booting issue. It was taking around 35 seconds to boot, and after the fresh install it takes about 7 seconds to boot.