Former laptop HDD in enclosure, need to boot to it

...but I have, so far, been unsuccessful.

HARDWARE USED:
NexStarSX enclosure (IDE to USB 2.0)
Toshiba MK6025GAS (60gb IDE 2.5" HDD) with XP Home on it
Asus M3N78 Pro motherboard

The Toshiba drive was rescued from a laptop whose motherboard had gone bad - power issues. So, I dropped it into an enclosure and decided to check the integrity of the drive, as well as debug the OS (they need basic stuff, nothing that CleanUp! can't cure real quick, and to add a better anti-malware setup).

I reset my BIOS to boot to external/usb devices, then CD, then my internal hard drive. It booted straight to my OS, on my hard drive.

Since I needed to do it anyway, I loaded up my XP Pro disc and decided to run recovery console and find the status of the laptop's drive. Recovery console recognized both installs of XP (my C: with professional on it, and the D: drive with home on it). I'm currently running a CHKDSK /R on it right now.

But resetting my BIOS didn't do the trick, which should have been all I needed to boot the laptop's drive, right? Or did I forget something?

 

On a lark, I disabled every boot device except for my external.

"DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER "

Does this mean I need to go back into recovery console and FIXMBR?

EDIT: Ran "fixboot d:" and it said it created a new boot record (I googled it), and I'm still returning the same issue. If creating a brand new boot sector isn't working, I doubt fixing the new MBR is going to make much difference...

 

I think you will find that it is not possible to boot to Windows on an external drive.

 

I suppose I could. I'll ask the person who I'm doing this project for, if it'd be okay to just do that. A second bootable system would have been a bonus, I think, to hand back to them.

Is linux bootable from an external USB cable? I've never tried it. (I'll go find some linux forums to ask how, if you think one of them can, otherwise, I'll just wipe the drive after backing everything up.)