Starting up acer laptop with USB external hard drive

[Lynxeff3ct]

My hard drive got the click of death so now I'm trying to boot up my laptop with a toshiba (same make as my dead hard drive) external hard drive by USB I've changed the bios settings so that it would start up from the USB but it's not working. It just comes up with the message 'no bootable devise insert boot disk'. I connected the external hard drive internally but still nothing. Is there anything I can do to get the laptop running again?

 

[Austin R]

So your trying to start up your laptop because your hard drive died with an external hard drive... Those externals cannot have an operating system installed and runnable due to formatting differences.
You can most likely put an OS on there and install it onto your laptop if you had another hard drive in the laptop..

 

[Lynxeff3ct]

So your trying to start up your laptop because your hard drive died with an external hard drive... Those externals cannot have an operating system installed and runnable due to formatting differences.
You can most likely put an OS on there and install it onto your laptop if you had another hard drive in the laptop..

How do I add an OS to it?

 

[Austin R]

burn the image to the external hard drive but keep in mind you need a working hard drive in your laptop.
Just because your laptop hard drive doesnt work now doesnt mean you can plug in a storage device and it will magically work. Keep in mind your operating system is on your dead hard drive, without it it won't run.