Question USB as temporary hard drive, possible?

[Trek0011]

Hi again got a quick question regarding my laptop which is a Dell E7450.

I dropped my laptop yesterday and it no longer starts up. When i turn on the laptop i get to the screen where it tells me that there is "no boot device found"
Then i have options such as,
press F1 to retry boot (or somewhere along those lines).
press F2 to enter bios
press F5 to run diagnostic test (Dell comes with a built in diagnostics tool).

Ive tried everything possible within the bios, everything points to my SSD being faulty, even the diagnostic tool fails to find the hard drive. Ive also taken the opertunity of installing the SSD into my main pc to see if my computer recognises it or not. My main pc did not find it so im pretty sure the SSD must be dead.

Now that the back story is out of the way, my question is, Can i insert a 64Gb usb storage device and attempt to reinstall a fresh copy of Win 7? Btw i have tried this but once i get to the point where windows 7 attempts to locate storage to install on, the usb device does not appear and im prompted to provide suitable storage before i can proceed.

I have read up quite a bit on whether or not this is possible but google seems to provide more info on creating a bootable win 7 usb rather than telling me if this is possible to use as a main drive. If this option is not possible would an external hard drive do the trick for me instead?

This is all temporary until i get hold of a new ssd btw, but would be nice to know if i can work around that for a week.

Thank you all in advance, any tips would be greatly appreciated. My apologies for the long read.

 

[R_1]

possible but not suggested. windows cannot see the USB because the installer does not have the USB drivers in its driver cache. no USB drivers means no USB which means no drive to install to.
a Windows OS will destroy a flash drive when used as the main. the many read/write cycles will kill it not to mention its slow.
Linux has full OSes that are made to run from a USB flash drive.
puppy linux variants can run entirely from ram for a snappy experience and can save your session to the USB so you can continue later.
most every distro it seems has a "Live" version. live meaning it runs from the USB at reduced speed with minimal trashing of the media.
temporarily I suggest linux mint with cinnamon, its easy for windows user to navigate.

 

[Trek0011]

possible but not suggested. windows cannot see the USB because the installer does not have the USB drivers in its driver cache. no USB drivers means no USB which means no drive to install to.
a Windows OS will destroy a flash drive when used as the main. the many read/write cycles will kill it not to mention its slow.
Linux has full OSes that are made to run from a USB flash drive.
puppy linux variants can run entirely from ram for a snappy experience and can save your session to the USB so you can continue later.
most every distro it seems has a "Live" version. live meaning it runs from the USB at reduced speed with minimal trashing of the media.
temporarily I suggest linux mint with cinnamon, its easy for windows user to navigate.

Thank you mate, i appreciate the quick reply. Just reading up on how to go about this.

 

[R_1]

Boot to a USB drive with linux on it. grab a USB drive, a copy of rufus and a linux distribution.
http://distrowatch.com/ has tons of differing linux distributions and download links. I personally am fond of linux mint with cinnamon.
https://rufus.ie/ the utility used to extract the ISO file to the USB drive.

use rufus to extract the selected ISO to the thumb drive. it will make the drive bootable and you can run linux from the drive once done.
Reboot into linux and proceed to test the hardware. connect to internet, watch videos, await problems.
if linux is good and stable the issue is most likely inside windows or otherwise software related.
this is a test of the hardware.

sorry I thought I posted this earlier

 

[Trek0011]

Boot to a USB drive with linux on it. grab a USB drive, a copy of rufus and a linux distribution.
http://distrowatch.com/ has tons of differing linux distributions and download links. I personally am fond of linux mint with cinnamon.
https://rufus.ie/ the utility used to extract the ISO file to the USB drive.

use rufus to extract the selected ISO to the thumb drive. it will make the drive bootable and you can run linux from the drive once done.
Reboot into linux and proceed to test the hardware. connect to internet, watch videos, await problems.
if linux is good and stable the issue is most likely inside windows or otherwise software related.
this is a test of the hardware.

sorry I thought I posted this earlier

Thank you so much, i appreciate the help.

I realized last night that the issue might also actually be the adapter itself rather than the SSD.

So basically the mSATA SSD connects to a 2.5" SATA adapter which then connects to the laptop MOBO via a HDD connector.

I might go ahead and buy the 2.5" SATA adapter and try testing the SSD again then work my way up from there, cheaper to do this than going ahead for a new SSD right away.

Again thank you so much for being such a help.