Making External USB HD bootable - True Image Home 2011
Can anyone give me a straight forward answer on this ....seem to be having a hard time getting one.
I have a diskless (no CD/DVD) laptop I need to image/backup and be able to restore. It has Win 7 and I am running Acronis True Image Home 2011.
I need to be able to make an external USB drive bootable so I can boot my notebook up and restore if needed but cannot use the Acronis installation/boot CD.
A few questions to ponder----
Will exFAT format on USB ext HD work? I want to make this drive bootable but apparently only FAT32 is supported. NTFS is not supported to make media bootable currently. Like in some of the other posts I have seen, only option in Win 7 is NTFS and exFAT for format types????
I know that buying an external CD/DVD drive is an option but I do not want to do this unless I have absolutely no alternative.
So....am I totally SOL on the USB solution then? -----thanks in advance for any help.
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sorry...not sure I understand how to accomplish this?? Advice please ...and thanks.
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Follow the steps for a full disk Backup. You can use the included help, or use the tutorials linked in the left margin of this forum.
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sorry...but if from Win 7 only allowable is NTFS and FATex how do I do different? I have to specifiy one or the other before I can proceed?
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Brian,
You need a USB Flash drive in addition to your USB hard drive. You can not make your USB hard drive bootable in most cases. In the Acronis program under Tool and Utilities, you would select the Rescue Media Builder after attaching your USB Flash drive (512MB or larger) and tell the Rescue Media Builder to use your USB Flash drive instead of a CD/DVD to make the bootable media (your USB Flash drive). Once it completes, you can then use the bootable USB Flash drive to boot your system.
You should format your USB hard drive as NTFS. The USB flash drive should be formatted as FAT or FAT32 (usually they come this way).
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As others have written, the easier way is to use the usb flash drive and make it Acronis bootable with the storage disk remaining as a normal usb external disk.
It is possible to make the usb storage disk into the same Acronis bootable hard drive so that the storage disk is both the storage part and the bootable part. This can be done using Grub4Dos. Click the top line of my signature below and investigate lines 4D and 4E. There are interim links to MVP MudCrab's webpage listing all the instructions.
One of my computers is a desktop with multiple internal disks. One of those internal SATA disk (750GB) is Acronis bootable via Grub4Dos and I have an assortment of current and prior Acronis versions of TrueImage Home as well as an assortment of other Windows (documents) and personal files.
I also have a 500GB USB storage disk containing multiple *.tib files which is Acronis Bootable.
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