I have a 250GB external hard drive that I would like to make bootable, but I need to figure out how. I tried to boot from USB external storage first, copy the iso to the HDD, and modify the bios boot order to boot from Windows iso files using the diskpart, but it always shows missing mgr. What should I do? How to turn a hard disk into a bootable drive?
Since the boot order can change and sometimes you may not have the external drive, I would advise disabling your primary drive or selecting disabled in the BIOS before installing Windows generally to the external drive. This is because you can install it entirely on the external drive (not just live).
The ISO image cannot be copied to an HDD. Instead, ISOs must be written on a CD or DVD (Windows 7 does it natively - right-click and choose burn disc.) Afterward, boot from the DVD and select your external HDD during the installation. You will be guided through partitioning it by the setup, making it bootable. It may be possible to burn an ISO to the HDD by tricking the device into thinking it is a DVD player, but that would be much more difficult than simply burning a DVD.
As far as I know, there are three ways to make a drive bootable:
You can try any of the methods above to make a hard drive bootable. However, if you want a more intelligent and easy-to-use method, EaseUS Todo Backup should be your first choice.
Related article: How to Make External Hard Drive Bootable in Windows 10/Windows 11
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