boot from external hard drive to run apps?

I have 3 Win XP Pro laptops, but the one I need for developing some software has a dead motherboard (of course). I took that hard drive out and put it in an external USB case so that I can access the files I need (although most are backed up on the functional laptops.) My question is: there are some programs on the now-external hard drive that I need to use and it would be much easier (it seems) to boot from the external drive to run the programs, rather than attempting to install them on a new computer and get everything re-set-up the way I want... Do I just set the boot order to boot from the external and will my programs on it just work from there, or is there something I need to do to make this happen? Or can I run the programs installed on the external even when booting from the internal hard drive??

 

You have several questions to address: first, you cannot boot to an internal drive and run the programs from the external drive, they will simply not run. The reasons why are fairly straight-forward: when the programs are installed, they create dependent .dll files (and others) and put them in various locations through out the drive and when they were installed, the drive was C:. But now the drive is an external (lets say it's drive E: ) so when you try to run the programs, they will still be looking at drive C: for these dependent files which (of course) aren't on C:, but on E:. If the PC has the option to boot from the external drive, it will boot and the programs will run only if the hardware that was originally run with the external drive when it was an internal drive is exactly the same as the PC you have it connected to as an external. If the hardware is not the same, it won't boot and will crash to a blue screen. One thing you could do even though it's a major pain, is to install the drive into one of your functioning laptops as the main drive (yes, you'd remove the current drive and install the one which is now an external). Then do a repair install of Windows. This will get the drive to boot into Windows and all of your documents and any software already installed on that drive will run perfectly. This is probably your best bet, otherwise you have to re-install all the programs you want to use and "get everything re-set-up the way I want".

Good luck!
:major
[dlb]

 

Yeah, I figured there wouldn't be an easy way! thank you for the information- it helps me a lot to understand what my constraints are