Windows To Go boot issues on HP Probook 4530s

[Airon Chow]

I have a copy of Windows 8.1 Pro to go installed on a Seagate backup plus slim external hard disk, and it works fine on more modern laptops (like my friend's Acer Aspire E 15), but shows "boot device not found" on my Probook 4530s.

I tried it with both the boot partition and system partition being the same NTFS partition, and with the boot partition as a 20GB FAT32 partition and system partition as NTFS.
Neither worked.

The internal hard drive in the Probook is corrupted or broken, so this is quite necessary until I can get it repaired or get a new laptop.


Windows 8.1 Pro
Seagate Backup Plus Slim 1TB
HP Probook 4530s

 

[Guest]

What I am typing here is more of a consolation than a solution. I am currently typing this sitting on my father's HP ProBook 4530s, the same one as yours. This one supports only windows 7 or anything lower. Won't work with windows 10, that I tried. My friends' laptops, atleast the ones same as mine also needs windows 7 at-max to run. Won't work with Windows 8 or 8.1 whatever. So maybe either you have to change the HDD of the probook itself or install Windows 7 w/ latest service pack on an external HDD & try the same process like you did with the Windows 8.1 PRO. If you get any errors then, come back & re-ask here on the forum. Best of Luck

 

[Airon Chow]

What I am typing here is more of a consolation than a solution. I am currently typing this sitting on my father's HP ProBook 4530s, the same one as yours. This one supports only windows 7 or anything lower. Won't work with windows 10, that I tried. My friends' laptops, atleast the ones same as mine also needs windows 7 at-max to run. Won't work with Windows 8 or 8.1 whatever. So maybe either you have to change the HDD of the probook itself or install Windows 7 w/ latest service pack on an external HDD & try the same process like you did with the Windows 8.1 PRO. If you get any errors then, come back & re-ask here on the forum. Best of Luck

Thanks for the consolation

When the windows 10 upgrade was first available, I had upgraded mine to it, and it worked fine enough, except for the small yet annoying issues that came with the brand new OS, so I rolled back to windows 7. And again, 2 months ago I installed windows 10 on it, this time however, although the small annoying issues were fixed, I had driver compatibility issues (mostly just the function keys not working, but they're very important for me) and got no useful help from HP's website. So yet again I rolled back to windows 7.

Although I've never personally tried installing windows 8/8.1 on it (because I've always found it appalling), I was sure it would work as the HP website has drivers available for it, and because windows 10 worked on it.
Unfortunately, I can no longer test if windows 8/8.1 would work on it.
I'm not sure why windows 10 works on my machine and not yours.

I tried this with Windows 8.1 because it's the among the first Windows OS's to officially support this kind of a set up (windows to go), and I read somewhere (lifehacker, I believe) that previous versions of windows can have issues and incompatibilities in this set up, and also for the driver compatibility.

I might try windows 7 though, if nothing else comes up, thanks for the suggestion.

 

[TerryLaze]

"boot device not found"
Might suggest that the bios is not even checking the USBs for bootable devices get into the bios and search for boot options,maybe you need to change secure boot ahci settings or just select the USB disk as the first boot drive,might be better if you searched the google for specific information on your PC.

You should also check out plop boot manager,it's also on hiren's bot cd which is a quite useful utility cd,needs an optical drive though or a floppy drive if you go for plop alone,that's an option if your PC just doesn't support any booting from USB.