Changing SATA to IDE mode (not to AHCI as it happens usually)?!

Jamesch

New Member
Hello

I have a company laptop (HP 8530w) with Checkpoint Pointsec HDD encryption and 32bit Vista.
I want to use win7 booted from an external eSATA drive. For that to work first of all I had to remove the internal HDD, because win7 install has already ****ed my system up one time (probably the MBR because the encryption never came up after I installed win7 on the external drive). Secondly I had to set SATA mode to IDE because in AHCI mode it can't be booted on this laptop. (RAID would also work but I didn't want to complicate things).
My question is if I try to boot from the internal drive would it **** Win Vista up or even the encryption stuff? I mean without resetting SATA mode to AHCI (so that i don't have to change it every time I want to boot from the extrnal drive). And that's not even the biggest issue: for now I think I will remove the internal drive every time I want to boot another OS, I don't want to go to IT support all the time.

Basically what i wanted to achieve is to get the laptop to boot from the external drive whenever it is plugged in at home, but boot the company OS Vista at work. It seems it is not that easy.
Do you think it can be done?
 

My Computer

Well, I just did and it is working.

Actually it is only true for USB devices, but even for that there is a workaround, not that complicated either. But for external SATA it is supposed to work just fine, because Windows doesn't realize it is extrnal, it only knows that it is on the SATA bus.

I am writing from that sytem right now.
 

My Computer

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