external hard drive as startup (please help)

darbooka

Can anyone provide helpful insight on this please:
I have an old laptop with minimal hard disk space that is starting to run out but can't afford to buy the new laptop that I want till much later in the year. The only thing I really need at present is more disc space but it has to be on the C drive where the emails and programs are installed.
If purchase a large-capacity external hard drive could I just copy-paste everything from my C drive onto the extrnal hard drive and use that as my start-up disc, without reinstalling everything? I'm asking if it would work to move my whole C drive as it is, onto the external drive and continue using that as though it was my laptop drive. (I only ever use it at home anyway so transportability is not a concern).
Thanks in advance for your help

MadCowMan

It depends on whether your laptop BIOS would boot from an external drive. Its not beyond the bounds of possibility to upgrade the drive in your laptop ( and not too expensive either ) - then you could always add external storage for data ( thus seperating Data and operating system , which would make your upgrade path easier. )

eg.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=401899

then all you would need would be to use something like Drive Snapshot to transfer an image to the new drive ( dont copy and paste , you'll miss some important stuff )

BillScarab

It may work, but you don't have to install programs on the C: drive, you can install them where you like. They normally default to the C: drive but you should get an option to change it when installing.

When we build servers at work, the C: drive is purely for the OS, all of the applications go on the E: drive.

Personally I would do a clearout on your existing drive first and get rid of anything you no longer need. Then buy an external hard drive and move all of you pictures, music, files etc. to it to free up space on your C: drive. Then you could move programs over, but to do that you would have to uninstall them form the C: drive and re-install them on the external drive.

darbooka

thanks for your help. i've already deleted/uninstalled everything i can from the c drive; the biggest concern is retaining my emails which is such a headache to move that i'd rather keepthem intact.

BillScarab

What email client are you using? You can usually easily change the folder that it uses to store the emails. So you could put them on an external drive.

darbooka

thanks bill! Does that work on outlook express; ie, could i change from c to d drive? that would solve a massive problem if it were possible.

espresso

darbooka wrote:

thanks bill! Does that work on outlook express; ie, could i change from c to d drive? that would solve a massive problem if it were possible.

Have you tried File, Export? If you archive your folders you could then do File, Import to get them all back on a new installation.

darbooka

hi, i once tried the export/archive route but it proved to be a nightmare to retrive the files into the proper folders and many reappeared as duplicates etc.