can you boot from an external hard drive

That might actually help clear things up. If you haven’t used yours for a while, try blowing it out with a little can of compressed air. On desktop machines, these drives really aren’t that hard to replace and they’re also pretty inexpensive.Īnother thing to keep in mind is that CD and DVD drives are great dust-catchers. Now, if there is a physical problem with your CD or DVD drive, then the thing to do is to get it fixed or replaced. When you get inside the BIOS interface, I recommend you set it to checking the CD or DVD first, then a USB, and then your hard disk. They all do it differently and they all have a different user interface.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you a step-by-step because that differs dramatically depending on your computer and your computer’s BIOS. The BIOS should let you change the order in which that check happens. So, if it checks the hard drive and finds Windows before it actually looks at the CD/DVD drive, then it will always ignore whatever’s inserted and boot from the hard drive. When your computer starts up, it looks at several different devices: the hard drive, the optical drive (the CD or DVD), and any connected USB drives and asks each one in turn, “Is there anything I can boot from here?” As soon as it gets the answer “yes”, the system stops looking for things to boot from and boots from the one that it found first. That’s a setting in your computer’s BIOS. There are a few solutions or approaches to think about taking.įirst, if you have a CD or DVD drive and the system just doesn’t appear to even be trying to boot from it, you’ll need to look into changing your boot order. This is gradually becoming more of an issue as optical drives are becoming optional on many smaller computers.

Can you boot from an external hard drive