11/23/20 – Strange USB Boot problem that I’m thinking is Windows oriented

Hi,

I can only think of two things..

Either your drive had been previously modified to boot from a USB and something changed that, or you are not booting from the external drive at all, but are being booted to the internal drive without the error.

I encountered this myself while testing... If your Bios detects the external drive is not a bootable device, you not get a “INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE” because it never even attempts to boot to it..

You are only getting that error because your Bios finds a boot file that it recognizes and attempts to boot.. At that point Windows rejects the boot attempt because it detects the drive as being USB..

Like I mentioned before.. I tried Windows 7 and 10 images that were several years old and could not possibly have the updates you suspect, and they failed..

The only way to verify the actual issue would be to unhook your internal boot drive and then see if the external will boot.. My guess is that it will not, but I have been wrong before.. You could actually disable your internal drive as a boot device by making it's boot partition "Not Active", but you would need a bootable 3rd party Disk Management tool to find out..

There may be another way to verify this.. Boot with the external drive.. Unhook your internet connection to be safe if you wish... Then look in Disk Management... Check the first "System Reserved" partition on the far left of the external drive... Right click on it and see if you have the option to "Make Not Active"..

If this is the boot device this option will not appear or be grayed out... If it does appear then you actually booted from the internal drive, and the internal drive will have this option grayed out or not available..

In my capture you are looking at my internal SSD boot partition.. The option to "Mark Partition As Active" is grayed out because it is the current boot drive and is already "Active" as you can see in it's description...

Your boot partition should look the same, although your partition will not be C:... I have configured my machine to not use the extra partition...

Another possibility as to why you may think you are booting to the USB and are not... Acronis may not have marked it's boot partition as "Active".. If it is not marked "Active" your Bios will ignore it and immediately revert to the internal without any type of error message..

The snapshot you previously provided shoes both your internal and external SSDs as being Active.. My guess is that the external drive from your storage IS NOT ACTIVE.. This would probably be the easiest thing to check to resolve the question..

OK, understand.

FWIW, setting aside the actual ‘Boot’ aspect of this thread, and going back to my original thinking out loud about the possibility of Windows updates causing the sudden “INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE” errors.

Did my monthly safe deposit box hard drive swap today.

Brought home the 11/01/20 - P51 clone which had no Windows updates installed since October 24.

Went through the normal USB Boot motions and did not get the ‘Inaccessible Boot Device’ error.

Before I shut back down I looked and sure enough, Windows updates had already poured in...had a dozen updates pending, so I put them all in ‘hidden’ status, then unplugged the USB SSD clone.

Will see if I can get any search hits for each of those update KB numbers regarding that error.

Hi,

I checked out the Lenovo Forum and it seemed to be too scattered among various models of machines, so I passed on that.. I am not interested in giving Lenovo any personal information should that be required.. Especially since I do not have a Lenovo..

That "Windows To Go" feature you have seen, was actually at one time a Microsoft feature.. From what I understand, it is only available in the Enterprise version of Windows now.. All it really does is to make a external drive acceptable by changing some type of internal Windows Boot File setting.. I wish I new how it was done myself..

I think it is probably frowned upon in the Forums to accept any type of compensation... It is supposed to be free assistance and up to the volunteer as to how deeply they want to get involved in a thread..

I learned something out of this as well, so this was mutually beneficial.. I may investigate in the future to see if I can find what type of settings changes are needed to make a external Windows drive bootable..

I was actually looking for that type of thing when I stumbled across the EaseUS and WinToGo..

PS:

Sent a brief followup Email to WinToUSB support asking them...since it appeared so simple & fast, what / where does 'Convert' make a change...laptop USB...Windows, etc?

Reply was:

WinToUSB changes the settings in Windows 10 Pro clone on the USB SSD hard drive.

............................................................................................................................................................................

So Lenovo was fine...once something got tweaked in the Windows USB clone copy, the Lenovo Boot Menu executed as it was supposed to.

Seems very odd to me for something so quick & simple, that Microsoft won't include the simple option to enable Boot from a USB Hard Drive...especially given that they already enable USB Flash Drives to boot...

Well, my personal preference would have been to buy you dinner or something.

If you change your mind, as I said, the Lenovo Forum does have private messaging available between members.

You've spent a significant amount of time & effort getting into this problem and I'll never forget it, thank you again very much !