My laptop is about to break, mechanically, completely. I plan to replace it. Likely replacements will come with Windoze, which I'd like to keep. I have external enclosures with USB-SATA adaptors to use external drives. I've never been able to boot off them; drives that boot when internal don't when external. Should I expect them too? Will Windoze put up with that? It's more pleasant than swapping drives.

If you can boot from a USB stick, it would make no sense to me that you cannot also boot from a USB drive. It's not something I've had a need to do, but I found a thread at Ask Ubuntu that looks like a good starting point for researching this.

You'll likely need to adjust the EFI/BIOS, to allow other O/S to boot - secure boot/fast boot - then make sure that USB boots before internal disk.

You should not have a problem booting any Linux from an external drive, simply change the BIOS setting to boot the drive attached via USB as suggested. If that should fail, make note of any error messages and post her. Microsoft prohibits a normal install of windows to a USB or firewire device (see the last post at the microsoft site below) but you already have windows installed so again, try booting windows after attaching the drive to a USB port. Doing an online search will get sites explaining how to create a bootable USB windows installer so try it and see what happens. The microsoft site at the link below indicates that cloning should work so simply attaching your drive to a usb port may also.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...8-fa79607178bc

I agree; experience disagrees.

That's mumbo-jumbo.

Didn't work.

I agree, experience disagrees.

I tried this years ago, got a variety of error messages, asked here.

Apologies, I thought it was the laptop that was the problem, but it is obviously these adapters - I have used USB to SATA cables to boot external drives, but some adapters just won't work.

Try with one of these cables...they're not expensive.

I don't recall ever having a problem booting a Linux OS from an external drive either booting from a bootloader on an internal drive or the external drive. Obviously, I haven't tested this with all of the 500+ Linux distributions. Good luck with it.

I've tried 2 different. Odd they work for every other purpose but booting. I don't have a good guess why that would be.

One of which cables?

Thanks.

I doubt distribution matters.

I'm not sure what you are trying to do. If you are planning to get a new computer with windows preinstalled, why would you remove the drive and try to boot it? You can get a standard usb external drive and should have no problem connecting to a usb port and installing a Linux distro there. So your problem is using the USB to SATA cables it would seem. Maybe some work better than others, I don't know as I've never used one. Good luck.

I've had the "enclosure with bootable drive fails to boot" issue on a laptop too. I think I ended up suspecting the usb<=>sata chip as a possible reason why, but I couldn't be positive. I agree enclosures wouldn't boot. They are not seen as bootable devices. My advice is: Forget external windows; forget internal windows. I have windows 11 here for when someone needs it. It never happens. Show them a tablet, they're usually just as happy.

What I also tried was inserting a second sata drive instead of the dead dvd thing. No dice either. The Bios would boot a dvd, not a second hd.

That doesn't stop you putting grub on sda with a windows choice 'root=/dev/sdbX' and going external at that point.

With USB drives there's an obstacle that usually doesn't exist when using exclusively SATA - USB drives often get their assignments mixed with or ahead of those on ATA. I knew that before I ever tried booting from any external drive installation, so used eSATA instead of USB when I wanted to give it a try. This was one of the reasons why UUIDs by default in Grub and fstabs displaced device names. That first try is sitting on a shelf, last updated in 2016, with 11 bootable OSes on it.

With a new laptop, Windows is most likely going to be installed on NVME. That's a different bus from ATA and USB. Theoretically this third bus would compound the older enumeration problem, but UEFI entered the picture around that time and has made it potentially easier to avoid enumeration trouble, mainly by not using device names for booting or fstab on the OS/user side, and by UEFI boot system intelligence. If the UEFI BIOS can be made to by-default always look first to a USB device to boot from before an internal NVME or SATA, you should be able to count on avoiding a Windows boot by having a bootable USB connected on power-up, if you can make Windows fully shutdown and not resume on power-up. Current installations of most distros use UUIDs to effectively workaround any potential enumeration trouble. Those who involve themselves more in configuration and maintenance can make it easier by using self-determined and thus memorable LABELs instead of UUIDs, with virtually the same reliability.

USB to SATA cable, there are lots, they are cheap, you may need to buy a few, but if it is the chip between the USB socket & the drive, these are the cheapest way to find out.