Booting From an External USB HDD?

Is there any way to boot from an external USB HDD on my laptop. I'm thinking of loading a new OS on my extra HDD from my old laptop. Is there a way to configure the bios to totally bypass the internal drive and boot to the external? I'd like to not remove it from my laptop if possible. This would not be a problem but my old HDD is ATA and the new laptop is SATA and I don't know of any adapters that will fit in the laptop and allow me to fit in the old drive. I'd rather not re-partition my drive. Anyone with any ideas?:

 

You cannot boot to Windows when it is on an external drive, apart from using eSATA (your old laptop does not have SATA anyway).

You cannot take the Windows HDD out of one computer and connect it into another computer without doing a repair re-installation of Windows (there are a few exceptions).

Can you explain some more about what you are trying to achieve?

 

I was interested in putting Ubuntu on a separate drive since I have some extra IDE laptop drives and dont want to mess around with my new laptop.

 

I can't help you with Ubuntu. I think it can be run from an external USB drive.

What you probably need to do first though, is to look in the BIOS/startup configuration of the laptop and see if it has the option to boot to a USB drive.

 

Read the following.

Installing ubuntu 9.10 to external hard drive

You can also run different versions of Linux from a thumb drive as you can from a CD/DVD.

Linux Live USB

 

Thanks!