ATTN: People who are more experienced with computers than I am

[fairyrune]

My current set up involves my old hard drive with Windows XP Pro in an enclosure, hooked up to my mother's laptop, also running XP Pro, via USB.

I wish to boot to my hard drive, so that I may retrieve my Firefox bookmarks. I didn't realize that Firefox didn't store bookmarks in a separate folder until I had already pulled the HD out of the tower it was in.

The laptop didn't want to boot to the enclosure, so I tried putting the Windows disk that came with my original desktop in, booting to that, and running a repair.

First of all, it called the enclosure drive D:/ instead of F:/, which is what the lappy calls it when I boot up normally. That was confusing.

I told it to repaid D:/, and it just sort of sat there at a DOS prompt looking at me funny.

What the hell do I have to do in order to boot to my HD? HALP!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Watch when your mother's laptop first boots, it may have something on the screen that flashes briefly in a corner saying something like press F12 for boot options or something to that extent. Many computers are not configured to boot from a USB device, but still have the ability to do so. That would be my first guess. Alternatively, if you are comfortable going there, look in the BIOS settings, you may have to set USB as the first item in the boot order. Just keep in mind the Windows on your external drive will likely try to adapt itself to the hardware change being booted in a new environment. It may get cranky. But if you are only going to boot to that disk one time only, then it's worth a shot. Just keep in mind it's a gamble. Your best bet if you can boot to your external drive would be to boot your Windows in safe mode. It may be ugly, but you should be able to get your data off.

The program on the Windows disc that is serving to do the repair attempt will look at the drives in logical order. By default and as a rule for PCs, primary hard drives will always be assigned as the C drive. Every following drive will be assigned in order, D and so on. It's nothing to take note of (in this case), your mother's laptop just has your hard disk assigned as F in it's own registry.

If none of this works, shoot me a message on Facebook, I'll see what else I can dig up. I would also like to suggest an add-on for Firefox called Xmarks. It syncs your bookmarks securely to their server, letting you sync them across multiple computers. Even if you only use a single machine, if that machine crashes, you haven't lost your bookmarks. You can also view your bookmarks through their web interface if you are at work for example.

[grigoricennui.livejournal.com]

^---This

Can I assume you're trying to boot to the drive because windows is giving you static about protected directories? If your mom's laptop is cranky about booting to a USB device, you can also do what I did as a backup plan. Go to Ubuntu's site and download their ISO and burn it to a disk. That allows you to boot from the CD-Rom into Ubuntu (without installing anything). Ubuntu doesn't give a fig about Windows permissions and you can take any file you want from the USB drive and copy it to your mom's lappy.

You can also just borrow my Ubuntu disk if you need to.

J.

[jedi-007.livejournal.com]

Worst case, if you access the drive, you can pull the file that firefox has stored the bookmarks in....

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles

For info on where it's stored... ususally....

[fairyrune]

SUCCESS! Thank you!

[krowface.livejournal.com]

go into the bios and change the boot order.