I seem to have an odd issue with a dual partitioned usb drive, here is my setup:
I created 2 partitions on my external hard drive. One partition has my bootable Windows environment ( WinPE 3.0 ) NTFS @ 10.0GB - which I set active - and the another partition is NTFS @ ~900GB.
I can boot to this external at anytime via any desktop (HP 7800-8200 SFF) . However, when I take my external to any laptop(HP 2530p, HP 8540p, etc) - I cannot boot to my external harddrive. I this error when I manually specify the system to boot to my USB external Hdd: "Error loading operating system".
This is everything that I have tried[which failed]:
- Shrinking the partition that holds my bootable OS to 1GB
- Performing a FULL format of that partition as
- FAT
- FAT32
- NTFS
- Changed the BIOS of the laptop between both AHCI and IDE
- Factory defaulted BIOS of the laptop
- Doing a Chkdsk on the external hdd & repair any bad sectors
- Made sure my bootable partition was marked as ACTIVE and PRIMARY (not logical)
- Changed the USB port used
- Put the WinPE into both partitions
Also, I tried booting to a bootable USB drive (same files, NTFS) with only one partition, which worked.
Note: I checked the MBR of the bootable drive & it looks correct. I dont think this is my issue because it CAN boot to the USB drive when connected to any desktop
The BIOS information on my laptop (HP 2530p) is as follows: ROM Revision 68PSU Ver. F.21 08/02/2012.
Why does this work on my desktops, but not my laptops?
