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I recently upgraded my main development machine to Windows 7. This involved wiping out my primary boot drive (Windows XP 64-bit) and starting clean. Before I wiped it, I did a direct disk-to-disk copy to a big external hard drive I have. While I have been able to migrate most of the necessary files without any problems, I was wanting to boot from it today to check a few settings. I plugged in the hard drive, rebooted, changed the BIOS to boot from USB-HDD first. But, no mattter what I do, it always boots from my primary drive to Windows 7. I do not see any kind of error message or anything.

How can I boot to Windows XP 64-bit on this external hard drive?

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I am currently running a CHKDSK /R on this drive right now. But it is a 2TB so it may take a while. – Josh Stodola Apr 2 '10 at 18:01
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Is the external drive bootable? How did you copy the data?

You need a boot sector on the drive, generally laid down by the installation process.

A simple windows copy will not copy this sector. You'd need to do the equivalent of a unix "dd" command to grab the exact image of the disk.

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I used Norton Ghost to do the disk-to-disk copy – Josh Stodola Apr 2 '10 at 18:06
Is there any way to make it bootable? – Josh Stodola Apr 2 '10 at 18:07
I think Ghost is supposed to do this, but am not sure. If you completely disconnect the internal drive and try to boot from the external drive, what happens? – DCookie Apr 2 '10 at 18:56
I will have to try that later, I am on the road now. Will keep you posted. – Josh Stodola Apr 2 '10 at 20:18
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No Windows OS will boot from an external HDD. This is by design.

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Where are your references? – Josh Stodola Apr 11 '10 at 15:10
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