cloned windows 7 dell optiplex 7010 on External SSD. Wanting it to open on my Dell inspirion 3020s

I'm sorry that I haven't been able to figure this out. But when I go into my bios to change boot sequence to open my cloned windows 7 computer on this new dell computer with Windows 11 pro, the bios does not list or recognize the external usb ssd that has the cloned windows 7 system on it. It did it very easily on the old computer when I cloned it to the external ssd and then ran it the whole computer from that external ssd which was much faster than the 500 gb internal hdd. I'm trying to get this system to open up on this computer because it is my wife's computer that I won't to run concurrently with an more up to date system.

Welcome to the forum

Because you are using a newer computer, it expects to see a GPT volume to boot from.

Since you cloned the old drive, it is most likely formatted for MBR and your new BIOS cannot recognise that as a boot volume, so the SSD does not show up at all.

Your best bet would be to use Virtual Box or similar and create a Virtual Machine for your Windows 7 install.

Then you can run the Windows 7 VM while you are still using Windows 11 and switch between them at will. You should not have any issues regarding Windows 7 hardware compatibility etc. doing things this way.

If your disk cloning software allows it, clone your Windows 7 install to a Virtual Hard Drive format such as .vmdk. That way you can simply transfer the file to your new machine for use in your Virtual Machine.

HTH

Insprion 3020 is apparently 13th gen intel. Getting win7 to run directly on a proprietary lga 1700 motherboard is quite a challenge.
Try the vm route as already suggested.

Running win7 directly on consumer intel lga 1151 (8&9 gen intel ) is quite straightforward. I am posting from win7 running on intel b365 motherboard now. More recent gets a bit tricky and proprietary (a.k.a. oem) intel motherboards are not really practical. People are running win7 successfully on fairly recent amd consumer am4 motherboards.

My external ssd with windows 7 which contains everything is all that is left. With Virtual Box could I still use what’s on that ssd to run my windows 7 system on the windows 11 computer?

I did not say thank you for that vital piece of info concerning windows 7 being MBR and Windows 11 being GPT. I have the easeUS program which allows conversion of MBR to GPT. The external SSD is a 1tb scandisc extreme. i partitioned it and am copying the clone in the mbr to another partition. The i will convert one the partitions to GPT. I will see then if the windows 11 bios will recognize and open the windows 7. I need to investigate the Virtual Box program because changing the boot order each time seems more cumbersome than opening any system at will.

richt54 said:

The i will convert one the partitions to GPT.

Click to expand...

gpt is a partition style for the whole disk.

Were you booting win7 via a usb connection?

SIW2 said:

gpt is a partition style for the whole disk

Click to expand...

guess I would have found that next. I would have thought NFTS or FAT would have been the Formats.

1. Initialize disk to a partition style
2. create partition
3. format partition to a filesystem

fat32 and ntfs are filesystems

Were you booting win7 via a usb connection on the old machine? It requires some registry changes to poll time and bootdriverflags for that to work.

With EaseUS I got the SSD with the cloned windows 7 to work from the External SSD via the USB on my old Dell Optiplex 7010. Converting this SSD to GPT via the EaseUS allows it to be recognized in the Windows 11 Bios and made into the primary boot disk on the new computer but it only gets to the Windows 7 screen before it crashes. So there is something else i need to do to get it to open up.

Windows 7 was never written to deal with modern hardware, that is why your disk was MBR to begin with.

If you are feeling lucky, convert the drive back to MBR.

Then, install DiskGenius on the Win11 machine and use it to clone the drive to one of these Virtual formats, .vdi, .vhd or .vmdk.

Then I can walk you through setting up Virtual Box.

Contrary to popular misconception, win7 can boot via usb simply by making the registry changes that ms made in the server edition and installing the appropriate usb3 drivers.

If your machine has csm support in bios it should be doable. Without csm support it can be done but needs a vga shim which is a bit fiddly for non enthusiaist. And either sysprep generalise or one of those adjust to new hardware modules can be helpful if the hardware is very different.

It will be easier for the op to go the vm route.

Open DiskGenius and select the drive, then go to Disk > Create New Virtual Disk File(N) > Create VirtualBox Virtual File(O), this will create a .vdi file of your drive.

Then download and install VirtualBox and make sure you download the Extension pack.

Let me know when you have completed these tasks and we will go from there.

I have downloaded the Diskgenuis program and have opened it but this is getting way past my wheel house. The only thing that I can see on this app is under the tools section where is says "virtualize system into virtual machine"

Are you unable to follow the instructions I just gave you?

256gb limit ? Put it on my 11 ssd or back on a partition of the usb ssd. I didn't see the instructions before I wrote the reply

Save the file to a location on your Win11 machine. Make sure you can easily find the file when you need to.

Set the capacity to the same size as your SSD or to 256GB. Do NOT check Allocate all disk space now.

its converting to my desk top. It will go to 4 green segments and then go back to clear.

Just let it do it's thing.

When it has finished (it may take a while) let me know the size of the file.

ok im seeing on my desk to windows7.vdi

Kewl, did you convert the drive back to MBR and is the drive now more or less, as it was when you first cloned the drive?