Long story short. I have an older pc that had a m.2 to sata connector. I accidentally broke the adapter and have moved the m.2 ssd to a m.2 USB 3.0 external enclosure to try and boot from that and am not having success. Is this possible? If so how? Don't want to lose my data and don't have access to another pc right now
You can't boot Windows 10 from USB port only way to do that is to use Windows To Go feature of Windows 10.
..and anyway creating Windows To Go on a USB requires Win 10 Pro upwards, a specific type of USB device and a working PC... neither of which applies here..
You could create a live boot disk (using another PC of course...) and thus boot your existing PC to at least gain access to your files... e.g. Kyhi's from the top of the Software and Apps section, or an older version of that pre-built:
Toolkit Item: Kyhi’s Rescue Disk – Win10.Guru
or Hiren's boot disk e.g.
Once you have a working drive back in your PC, if you can't use your existing drive again, you can use disk imaging to transfer Windows to the new disk, if that's what you need to do.
I managed to fix it.
It's booting out of the external USB enclosure for the m.2.
The issue was the 3 hardware changes for windows preventing it to boot. I simply needed to repair. Kept my old documents and now I'm booting from my old hard drive through a USB cable
Quote