Dual Boot with Win8 on SSD and Win7 on ESATA external drive

[picodegalla]

Hey guys, This is my first post ever so lets see how it goes.

I have 3 year old Toshiba Satellite A505 - 6565, 8Gb ram, 500Gb HDD, Intel Centrino 2. I want to upgrade my Laptop with a 256gb SSD and install windows 8 on it and use this as my primary drive but also have the capability of booting from my old HDD using the ESATA port on my laptop coupled with an ext. enclosure drive.

I bought the enclosure, set everything up, even set my BIOS to boot from ESATA but I did leave my primary bay empty since I have yet to buy a SSD. When I turn on my laptop on, it did not locate the external drive with the 500Gb and windows 7 already loaded on it but instead it started looking for my graphics card or something else not really sure. But it acted like it should when there is no HDD in the laptop.

So my questions is:

Is what I am trying to do even possible?

Do I need to have a drive in the main bay at all times?

If it is possible, could someone tell me how or post a link to someone who has done the same thing I am trying to accomplish?

Thanks ahead of time guy and gals!

[picodegalla]

I guess I should also mentioned that the OS is windows 7 x64 Ultimate.

[MANEMAN]

Welcome.

Is what I am trying to do even possible?

Theoretically yes. The BIOS Seems to suggest that the machine is all set up to do this. It would have been nice to hear that you have had an eSATA external drive connected in the past, and that you could "read" from it. Proving of course that there is not some kind of internal disconnection between the eSATA input socket and the Motherboard.

The next thing that could be at fault of course is the external enclosure electronics. I have had a couple that were bad from new and had to be returned. Is there another machine available (Perhaps a friend) that you could connect too ?

I have had a quick look on the internet and can find very little in the way of eSATA information on your particular model of computer. A manual or tech info would have been handy. Individual Laptop manufacturers do some weird and wonderful things sometimes like: "To switch to external eSATA boot press Fn and then key XZX", and also require extra drivers.to do so.

Could this be the case ? - If it is, the best bet would be to contact Toshiba Support.

Can you hear the external drive spinning ?

Do I need to have a drive in the main bay at all times?

I would have thought not. But once again without any tech info, - Who knows ?

Here are a few links that may or may not be useful to you.

Toshiba does have it's own help forum: http://forums.toshiba.com/

http://uk.computers....SUPPORT_PORTAL/

http://www.csd.toshi...rt/jsp/home.jsp

http://www.ehow.com/...disc-drive.html

http://answers.micro...c3-a0325ad045ac

All the best.

John.

[picodegalla]

Thanks for your quick reply!!

I will talk with my tech guy at the school I work at and get a drive from him to see if the is even functional, that was my first fear. I still have manual for my laptop i will see if there is any info in there about odd booting configurations with esata.

The drive does spin and even in BIOS it sometimes recognizes the drive as Hitachi with its model number but then it also has a (E1) next to the number and this does not appear when put in the main bay.

Another issue is that my computer originally came with vista and was updated to windows 7 so there may be some driver issues but I am pretty certain I have taken care of that.

[tax3ver]

Hi folks,

looks like i'm not the only one with this kind of problems.

Heres is my configuration:

DELL laptop: <latitude e6510> with 8gb ram, internal hd (320 gb) and there is also an external esata port.

I use'd it before with my seagate flexdrive and now i have replace the original 500gb with an 250gb ssd from samsung (840 series).

All worked fine, so i tried to install win8 prof. on the external. on the bios setup i have the option to select the boot device (F12) and this also too worked fine.

For me it was clear that i have to blank the drive befor installing win8. I even removed the internal hd in order to not let the installation write some bootsectors or kind of things on the internal drive.

After that, i booted the installation dvd and installed win8 without any problems on the ssd in the seagate flexdrive which was connected via the esata port.

Booting the os was no problem and i started smiling.... :=)

Well, after a while (about 2 days) the problems began. Most of the time the system just simply rebooted without a reason and all my work was gone. Even not doing anything except booting up win8 and let the system stay idle does not prevent the rebooting after a while.

Any ideas ?