booting laptop with no internal drive

[chronoman]

hi
my friend has laptop which has overheating problem which in turn is failing the hard drive.
my question is can you use an external hdd drive to run laptop without internal being present thus opening bay an fan cool below which could save bill as laptop isnt used portably
thanks
chronoman

 

[gooddeed]

Yes, you can install an operating system to an external hard drive, If you go into the bios there should be an option to boot from a usb device first which will save you time not waiting for the machine to check for an internal drive then cd etc.

 

[nilrem]

The lappy shouldn't be getting hot enough to kill hard drives , have you cleaned the dust out of the fan and heatsink and also make sure the laptop is used on a hard flat surface to ensure air can circulate around the case , all of the above should help it stay cool

Cheers

 

[chronoman]

thanks for replies
ther is problem with overheating.
If you switch on from cold you can get a couple of hrs ok using fans underneath otherwise 15 mins maybe

 

[oneman]

the laptop may not get hot enough to kill the drive however all it may need is a good clean.

 

[chronoman]

having probs installing from external drive on both my own and his laptop.
it lets me install windows but on 1st reboot i get blue screen both on presario and my acer laptop and both allow me to use boot disk in windows and create partition etc on external but after installing devices it fails .
Any help ,thoughts appreciated

cheers chronoman

 

[Jooooles]

If you can get into your bios theres a heat saftey so many degrees option turn it off thats whats probably shutting your computer down.

Is your external harddrive FAT32 most come in that formatt you may have to formatt it to NTFS to boot and run windows xp

 

[chronoman]

hi the laptop isnt shutting down ,whats happening is it says ne media present please check cables.
istrpped down and spray dusted but still same problem.
i have tried fat and ntfs and both the same.
cheers for input though