How to start Windows Vista on a USB Hard drive that has a Vista backup already on it

Hello, at first I thought I had a virus (blue screens appearing often), then I thought I had a corrupted driver or systems file. So I got a 2TB USB external hard drive and backed up EVERYTHING from my Internal hard drive. After running all sorts of tests my internal hard drive, it does NOT pass the diagnostics test and always stops on the same spot on the internal hard drive. It is getting harder and harder to boot to my internal "C" drive without getting some kind of blue screen. I'm pretty sure now it is my "C" internal drive that is going down and malfunctioning and I'm convinced now to go ahead and either startup my existing Vista SP2 that I have backed up on my external "K" drive, or if I cannot, then do a new clean install of Vista 86x (32 bit) on the "K" drive. My boot sequence is as follows: 1. Floppy 2 DVD 3. USB "K" external drive 4. C internal drive (eventually when I can get everything fixed, I will DISABLE my "C" drive. When I boot my computer without my Vista Disk, it bypasses the "K" drive because either all the "loadup data" is inside a file folder and is not exposed, or I do not have the right "load up" files in the right place. When I look at the copied autoexec.bat and config.sys files, I do not see anything in those files that would "load" my existing Vista, instead it just goes right past the "K" USB drive and right to the "C" interanl drive and loads a clean intalled version of my Vista (If I can avoid a blue screen, sometimes I have to load to into "safemode" and even it does not always work!) My question is what loadup files are needed and in what location on my "K" drive (in system32 ?) to be able to restart my older copy of Vista that has all of my existing setups in place?Thank you in advance for your help.

Re: How to start Windows Vista on a USB Hard drive that has a Vista backup already on

I think you would find it easier to make a backup image of your C: drive. Buy a new internal drive, and restore to it. Use an imaging program such as Macrium or ToDo.

you may find additional free imaging progams on
thefreecountry.com: Free Programmers' Resources, Free Webmasters' Resources, Free Security Resources

You might be able to get Vista to boot from a USB. But to perfect it likely requires a lot of trial and error on a working system. To try to do it on a crippled machine is setting yourself up for headaches.