BOAC says:
rgb - been away trying that. I do not seem to have cracked it, though as my own laptop will not boot from my 500gb USB hard drive partition (after using Partition manager and bootsect). New territory for me. USB drive was set up in XP - will that affect this?
Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you but the 5 hour time difference between us is not conducive to helping someone with a problem!
That the USB drive was set up in XP should be irrelevant. I would imagine
that the drive is using the NTFS file system? Can you verify that? Can you get into the BIOS on your laptop and, using the appropriate menu action, re-order the boot sequence so the first one would be your USB device?
Did you try the preferred method I wrote earlier?