Elements 6.0 won't run from my external hard drive?

Question

So I had Photoshop Elements 6.0 installed on my laptop. Long story short, my laptop died. I removed the hard drive, put it in a case and turned it into an external. When placed into another working laptop, Elements runs just fine. However, when I hook it up as an external, it refuses to run. Because I didn't make an icon for PSE on my desktop, I have to go into Program Files and under PSE 6.0 and find the application icon for it and double click. A message pops up saying "Licensing for this product has stopped working. - You cannot use this product at this time. You must repair the problem by uninstalling and then reinstalling this product or contacting your IT administrator or Adobe customer support for help."
What gives?

Answer 1

dj_paige wrote:
 If you take the hard drive and install it into a different computer and make this hard drive the system drive (i.e. the drive where the operating system is installed) then everything on that drive should work properly. If you take the hard drive and attach it to a computer that already has a system drive, nothing on that hard drive will work.
Mr Ellis had a more lucid explanation of this, but I'll add a bit to both of your treatises, hopefully this will add clarity, but who knows, anything can happen.
The >> BIOS << of a computer is responsible for the "boot order" of the machine. That is where the computer gets its instructions about where to look for the OS. If you summarily stuff a random HDD into a machine and expect it to boot from it, in most cases you will be disappointed. Since the drive didn't exist before, it likely won't appear first in the boot order, and gets ignored. So, to use any random HDD, you first would have to go into the BIOS and place it first in the boot order, then the computer would use the OS it found there to begin the session.
The trouble is, Windows takes note of hardware changes, and might ask you to reactivate Windows, when it realizes it is no longer in the original computer. Obviously the original hardware manifest is on the HDD being transported, and would be dramatically different from the hardware environment of the new machine.
In most cases, Windows will not perform up to expectations if it isn't reinstalled into the new host machine.
However you can retrieve the catalog file from the laptop HDD and place it in the new computer, and also copy the "My Pictures" folder to it. Since, in this case both the laptop "My Pictures" and desktop "My Pictures" are both likely on their respective "C:/" drives, in all likelyhood PSE would be able to open the catalog successfully.
I should add that in the case of running the OS from an external HDD, the first choice in the computer's boot order must be set to, "boot from USB device"!