Booting and running Windows 7 from USB external HDD

[DOS_equis]

I was wondering if there is a way to boot into Windows 7 from a external HDD using one of those USB adapters? I need to boot into an older instalation to retreive the Access Connections profiles from it. I forgot to export them to a .LOA file. The HDD has a cloned image of my old install. I have gotten as far as the colored swirling balls and it appears to want to boot up but then I get a BSOD (sorry I don't remember the error code off hand). The code is related to HDD drivers. I was thinking of switching the BIOS to compatibility/ legacy mode to see if that works but I haven't tried it yet. Do you think this will work or will I have to reclone the old install back the way it was just to get the profiles off of it? Is there away to get the profiles off of it without going through either of these headaches?

Thanks in advace,
DOS_equis

[sarbin]

try switching bios sata setting to compatibility and give it a try. easy enough to rule it out before going through the extra effort, and don't think it'll hurt anything.

[DOS_equis]

try switching bios sata setting to compatibility and give it a try. easy enough to rule it out before going through the extra effort, and don't think it'll hurt anything.

Ok I tried doing that last night and it didn't seem to do anything and it wouldn't let me perform a repair using the OS disc. It kept trying to repair the internal drive and never gave me an option to select the external drive. After thinking about it some after the fact, I realized that switching the SATA mode probably wouldn't of done anything because I don't think it's using the onboard SATA controller to boot since it's connected via USB. I have an ultrabay SATA drive sled that I can use to try and get this to boot "normally" without the USB adapter. I have a feeling that I will have better luck with that approach. BTW the errors I received were 0x0000007B on the blue screen during "boot normally" and 0xc000000e on the console screen when I try to repair the disc without the OS disc available.

I know MS says it's "illegal" to boot from USB to help thwart piracy but this is kinda annoying IMO. I know this can be done but it sure is tough to get it to behave. Is there a way that I can get the WI-Fi profile info from the drive without having to reimage it to another drive? The info has to be stored somewhere.

To get the drive to even let me see the color ball swirl I had to boot into my normal OS on the internal drive and set the "system reserved" part of the external drive to "active" and then play with BCDedit to set the boot partition info correctly. It actually has a "dual boot" setup on it as far as the BCD store on the external is concerned. I have a "Windows 7 USB" labeled configuration and a "Windows 7" one. The USB one is for the external HDD of course and the other is for the internal HDD in the notebook. This happened when I tried to do a BCD repair from the CLI I think.

[GomJabbar]

The problem might be that you have a copy of Windows 7 on your internal hard drive. Try pulling out the internal hard drive, then booting from the USB drive. If you need to copy something over, save it to a USB key or CD/R.

[DOS_equis]

The problem might be that you have a copy of Windows 7 on your internal hard drive. Try pulling out the internal hard drive, then booting from the USB drive. If you need to copy something over, save it to a USB key or CD/R.

Ok I tried that and it didn't seem to make a difference. I did experiment a little though and discovered some cool stuff.

I had the old 100 GB HDD from this machine that has an operational Win7 OS on it. I switched out the HDD with a new 500 GB one because I occasionally heard clicking sounds from it when it was running. I never wiped out the old install or anything so it was good to go the way it was. I first tried to boot from the 100 GB drive using the USB adapter and got the BSOD. I then had Windows try to do a boot repair. After some HDD thrashing time went by it gave up and claimed that it couldn't repair the boot problem. I then shut the machine down and installed the 100 GB HDD in the ultrabay sled and rebooted the machine (still with the current 500 GB HDD removed) and it instantly booted up no problem as if that was the way I always had it set up. MS has effectively banned the ext HDD booting option for me since I'm not savvy enough to bypass it.

I also looked into a workaround for getting the Wi-Fi profiles off of the drive. I noticed that when you use Acc Conn to manage your wireless profiles, Windows creates it's own profiles under "network and sharing center" in the manage wireless networks section. These profiles are stored as encrypted .xml files in the following path: C://programdata/microsoft/Wlansvc/Profiles/Interfaces/[profileID]. The programdata folder is hidden so you may have to turn on hidden folder viewing. Unfortunately, you can't just copy paste them to another machine. Windows keeps track of the profile ID's it has used in the registry so the only way to export them without having to install the administrator app for Acc Conn is to do it through Windows using a USB thumbdrive which requires booting into the OS. From reading the user guide for the AC admin app, it seems you will still have to have the security keys/ passphrases for each profile. If I knew all of that I wouldn't have to bother with the export anyway (unless I misunderstood something) so to me it seems pointless to go that route. With the Windows export it retains the security info and all so that would be the easiest way.

If you want to go the registry mod route (which you could use to recover profiles from a damaged and unbootable OS install) you have to navigate to: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Wlansvc\Interfaces\[ProfileID]. The profileID is the hex-looking string used to ID the folder the profiles are stored in. First click on the key with the folder profileID in question. Then add the wi-fi profileID to the "ProfileList" string including the brackets. Easy way to save typing it out is to first open the .xml file and copy the info out of the browser addressbar (second string) and then paste it to the string value after the others listed in there. Next you will have to open the Profiles key. This one tells Windows the "official" profile names to show in the control panel GUI. You have to create a new key with the profile ID as the name. Then create a key called "MetaData" and fill it with all of the info from a good working profile. You do this by right-clicking the "MetaData" key and add a new Binary value to it. The name for the first one is "All User Profile Security Descriptor" the value is copied from an existing profile that is known to work. Right-click the known good one you want to copy and select modify binary data. Highlight the binary data and copy it and then paste it to the same named key in the new one you are making. The second binary value is "succeeded". It tells Windows if the profile was successfully connected to a network. The binary value will be 01 00 00 00 for a connected one and all zeros for one that didn't connect. Finally you need to reboot the machine for the changes to take effect. Once your back into Windows you should be able to see the new profiles you manually imported through the registry in windows profile list like normal. I doesn't look like they automatically transfer to Acc Conn since they weren't created in there but you can get to the security info easily enough by double clicking the profile in windows.

I hope this will help out someone in the future that has a similar problem like I did where I couldn't get back into an old OS to retrieve Wi-Fi profiles from it. The reg mod route is the hardest way to do it but at least it can be done. All of this info I found on my own by fighting my way through it and tinkering around with it. If someone else has suggestions for any of the above let me know and I will try them out and test it.

DOS_equis