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"bootable" flash drive backup does not boot

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I made a backup of my EeePC 901 netbook with Windows XP on to a USB flash drive, with the option checked to make the drive bootable. The backup went smoothly, and verified without issues. But when checking that the media is bootable, it doesn't recognise my USB as a bootable drive. I tried the stand-alone option of making the media bootable, with the option of copying Acronis TI Home 2011 onto the flash, which seemed to work, but it is still not bootable.

In the BIOS, the drive is recognised as one of the available hard disks, and under the boot order option, I made it 1st priority (Listed as "removable drive"). When that didn't work, I removed all other boot options from the BIOS, and still it does not boot. The USB flash drive is formatted with FAT32. Any suggestions?

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Mike,

As far as I know, the Acronis bootable media option often only works** with plattered or SSD drives, for flash drives you need to make them bootable either by using Grub4Dos or using an HP utility.

**Some flash drives do report themselves as a hard drive and then the Acronis booting option works, others don't.

What size is your flash drive?

What motherboard/chipset are you using? I have a Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H, which absolutley refuses to boot from any external USB drive (I have 5 USB drives), but my Lenovo laptop has no problem at all.

Mike,

It should work. Colin is right that it doesn't work with certain flash drives.

You can try this post here to make the USB bootable with the latest ISO from ATI, for example, and then set the flash drive as a regular drive destination.

http://www.themudcrab.com/acronis_grub4dos.php#tagISO

I would be a nice ideaa to get a tool which does it made by Acronis. My 2cents

To be clear, ATI should be able to make it happen. Unfortunately, there are some issues with some brands or models of flash drives.

Thanks, Colin.
My flash drive is a Transcend 8GB, which is big enough for the 12GB SSD's that my netbook comes with. I am quite happy to get myself another brand of Flash disk, and see if that works better. I do have a USB DVD writer, and managed to get a working backup by 1) making a bootable DVD with the Acronis software loaded on it, then 2) booting up on the bootable DVD, and 3) making a backup of each of my two SSD's in turn. I guess this backup should be secure, but somehow, I'd feel safer with my backup on a bootable flash drive. I'm sure I'll come right. Thanks for the help.

I have Dell GX260, 2.2mhz Acronis 13, HP 32gb USB flash drive. I did a C drive full disk save with the option to make the USB bootable.
Setting up to boot via USB I get the error "Fatal Error boot drive partition not found".
The data got stored but the boot partition did not get on the stick. I tried the stand alone "make it bootable" and that also failed.
My user manual says it works.
Inspection of the USB drive with computer manager-disk manager fails to show more than one partition on the stick.
I fail to see what good it would do to make the stick bootable with dos. I need to be able to boot into Acronis with all my drivers intact.

dick,

I would suggest that you open an Administrative Command Prompt and use the diskpart command line utility to CLEAN, PARTITON, make ACTIVE, and FORMAT (as FAT32) your Flash drive before starting the Acronis backup to it. This will give you a fresh starting point.

When creating the backup to the Flash drive with the selection of making it bootable is enabled, only the boot sector is updated to include the boot code, no additional boot partitions will be created (or visible). The boot sector and code is Linux based, not DOS.