Windows 10: No hard drive fitted to laptop but still boots up on an operating system.

I've been having a few issues recently and noticed something. My laptop Lenovo T430 wont work on certain hard drives that it used to and after some investigation I've found that even though there is NO hard drive connected it still boots up, shows the windows back ground, shows icons like recycle bin, Microsoft edge etc. When I checked the ''msinfo'' it shows up windows 11, bios mode UEFI etc. It doesn't show up all my apps but it certainly shows quite a lot of them. Why might this be? Could this be a reason for my laptop not accepting the other hard drives?Thanks.

:)

 

operating system on external hard drive

Hi Bhaskarramagiri,

Thank you for posting your query in Microsoft Community.

In order to understand the issue better can you share

• 
  Which Operating System was previously installed?
  
• 
  Can you share how did you try to format the C drive?
  
• 
  Are you completely not able to boot the system?
  

Yes, you can access your internal drives by booting from the external hard disk, by changing the boot order of the "bootable" devices on your computer.

Do let us know if you have any other queries pertaining to Windows in the future. We will be happy to help.

Thank you.

 

Laptop hard drive upgrade

To replace a hard drive on a laptop is a little more troublesome than a desktop. 1st as most people here suggest you will need some sort of a backup disk just in case. Also be sure when buying the new Hard Disk is compatible with your model. And i would strongly suggest you install a new system and start from scratch because there are far too many problems that can occur when transferring system files.

 

Laptop hard drive upgrade

Yeah but it is a bit of a bummer when i have paid for a genuine copy of windows mce.
but i do have a copy of vista that i could put in the laptop but i am not too sure it will be good as it is slower on my desktop which i dual boot wwith xp. the spec is

3000+ SEMPRON CPU
1GB DDR RAM
40 GB RAM