Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Can I Boot Windows Vista from my dead windows laptop's hard drive to my MacBook pro?

R

Richey Villa

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 16, 2011
14
0
My HP windows vista laptop recently died and I have recovered the HDD from the dead lapop. I have ordered an enclosure to convert it to an external USB powered HDD. Is it possible to boot Windows Vista to my Mac from this external HDD? If there is a method to do this? Any help would be really appreciated :)
 
You won't be able to boot from the external hard drive but you can browse the drive from your Mac to copy off any important data that you have.
 
Ok thanks for replying to my question. I shall just get the data of it then and format it to use as a normal external hard drive for my mac.
 
No problemo.

Out of curiousity, how did you HP laptop? Was it a fault or just from age? I've had an incredibly bad experience bad experience with my HP laptop dying but I'm unsure if I'm just an isolated case.
 
You won't be able to boot into the operating system with that drive mounted externally or inside of your computer. It would have to be installed through boot camp, which would necessitate wiping the drive

The best bet would be plugging the drive into an external enclosure and copying the files off the drive manually. I can't see any way to boot that drive outside of putting it into a windows PC that has VERY similar specs to the busted one - with macs, its pretty easy to install an OS on one computer and plug the drive into another, similar computer. With windows, the kernel tends not to like it and you will get a BSOD before even booting if you are trying to boot it through a computer that has specs that are significantly dissimilar to the one the drive came from.
 
The laptop was only 2 years old. It was a problem with the NVidia graphics chipset. After taking the laptop to a repair shop and reserching on the internet I found out there is a design fault with some NVidia chipsets. My laptop had one of these faulty chipsets. And there have been thousands of cases of this happening with HP laptops and other laptops. HP have recognised the fault on some laptop models and have repaired or compensated people, but they refused to admit it was a problem with my laptop. So they just fobbed me off. But because of Legislation in the UK where I live I managed to get the retailer (PC World) to refund me 55% of the cost of the laptop back to me. PC World admited the laptop had been sold to me with a design fault unlike HP. Never known such terrible customer service. They wanted me to pay £15 just to speak to a HP technician. If your out of warrenty they don't want to know. Terrible customer service. Decided to put the money towards getting a mac because I heard there realiable and I heard a lot of good things about them. So far I'm not dissapointed.
 
Ok thanks for the reply Gabik. Think I will just do away with Windows Vista then and just extract the files. Was a terrible OS anyway.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back