Boot from External hardrive?

[Washington]

I've asked this before but got no reply so I thought it wasn't possible, but I was playing in BIOS yesterday of my old pc and noticed that I was able to choose USB device as an option to boot from.

So from this can I assume that I can boot from an external drive?

 

[G35x]

Im not sure, but i saw a thread on this and you have to get windows lite to boot from an extrnal hard drive. Any who why do you want to boot from an external hard drive?

 

[Gamingfreak]

why not just try it?

 

[G35x]

I guess,but i dont really see the point in it. Why would you want to boot via usb cable wouldnt it be slower?

 

[Washington]

The reason I want to boot from an external hardrive is that it's for a laptop. There's not much difference in the price of a 250GB external hardrive than a 60GB 2.5 internal hardive.

Plus I'm not sure if there's a problem with my laptop. Recently the hardrive failed and I had to replace it. Now the new hardrive is being accessed every second and is never completely quite even when the computer is idle. When I go into task manager the CPU never goes to 0% and usually fluctuates between 6% and 15% with nothing running in the background. So I don't know whats going on there.

So anyway I thought booting from an external drive may sort this problem, plus if it goes again I would stand a better chance of recovering data from an external hardrive by connecting it to another pc.

I can't just try it as I haven't bought an exernal hardrive yet. Thought I would get advice first!