After upgrading my Dell Latitude E6500 to Win7 with a new HD, I bought a 2.5" SATA HD to USB 3.0 enclosure (from Fry's Electronics) for my old HD, which "IS" my former XP computer.
My hope was to be able to occasionally reboot via USB from the old XP Hard Drive whenever needed, via the USB enclosure, so as to access files and occasionally run old programs.
However, restarting the laptop with the XP external USB drive connected (and my bios set to boot from USB first), The computer starts to boot XP, then quits with a "Stop Error 0x0000007B."
(Whereas, if I put the old XP HD back into the laptop, it still boots just fine.) And, from the USB enclosure, when I boot up Win7, I can access all my files
I asked the manufacturer of the external HD enclosure how to overcome this problem, but their answer was that there must be some error in the old XP HD partition, and I would have to reformat it, and then reinstall all programs and files, to make it bootable from the external USB enclosure.
This, of course, would destroy my perfectly good XP system, programs, and files, and also doesn't make sense to me: if there's a partition error, why does this 'bad partition' still boot OK when I re-install the old XP drive into the laptop? At this point, I don't even have some of my old program installers from XP, so reformatting and then rebuilding the entire XP drive, is simply not an option.
Can anyone tell me how I can overcome this problem? It's not practical to swap my hard drives in and out of the Dell Laptop's HD bay every time I have an urge to boot up my old XP HD.
Is there some way to save the XP drive as an image file, reformat the XP drive, and then restore the drive image back to the reformatted XP drive, so that all installed programs and files still work OK?