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Installing without an optical drive

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I have a laptop without an optical drive, and Acronis True Image Home version11.

Can I copy the CD to a USB drive and install from there, or do I have to buy an external CD drive ?

Many thanks

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If you registered the serial number in your account at the Acronis website, you can log-in there and download the latest version of 2011 directly to your computer at no charge. Once there, click on My Products and Downloads, click the "+" on the 2011 version, and download from there.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/

Thank you for the prompt reply - all successfully done !

Which leads directly to the next question on the same theme - I have created the bootable media on a Flash drive in case I need to recover using that method. How do I get the laptop to boot from the Flash drive ?

You will need to arrange the boot order of your machine in the BIOS setup by selecting the USB device to boot before the HD. That way the machine will look there first. If your flash drive has been inserted prior to starting the machine, it will start from it. If the drive is not inserted, the startup will simply move on to HD.

Here is some information from the HELP files on arranging boot order:

Arranging boot order in BIOS
BIOS has a built-in setup utility for initial computer configuration. To enter it, you have to press a certain key combination (Del, F1, Ctrl+Alt+Esc, Ctrl+Esc, or some other, depending on your BIOS) during the POST (power-on self test) sequence that starts immediately after you turn your computer on. Usually the message with the required key combination is displayed during the startup test. Pressing this combination takes you to the menu of the setup utility that is included in your BIOS.

The menu can differ in appearance, sets of items and their names, depending on the BIOS manufacturer. The most widely known BIOS makers for PC motherboards are Award/Phoenix and AMI. Moreover, while items in the standard setup menu are mostly the same for various BIOSes, items of the extended (or advanced) setup heavily depend on the computer and BIOS version.

Among other things, the BIOS menu allows you to adjust the boot order.

Computer BIOS allows booting operating systems not only from hard disks, but also from CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, and other devices. Changing the boot order may be required, for example, to make your rescue media (CD, DVD or USB stick) device the first booting device.

If there are several hard disks installed in your computer labeled as C:, D:, E:, and F:, you can change the boot order so that an operating system is booted from, for example, disk E:. In this case, you have to set the boot order to look like E:, CD-ROM:, A:, C:, D:.

This does not mean that booting is done from the first device in this list; it only means that the first attempt to boot an operating system will be from this device. There may be no operating system on disk E:, or it may be inactive. In this case, BIOS queries the next device in the list.
The BIOS numbers disks according to the order in which they are connected to IDE controllers (primary master, primary slave, secondary master, secondary slave); next go the SCSI hard disks.

This order is broken if you change the boot order in BIOS setup. If, for example, you specify that booting has to be done from hard disk E:, numbering starts with the hard disk that would be the third in usual circumstances (it is usually the secondary master for IDE hard drives).

Some motherboards have a so called boot menu opened by pressing a certain key or key combination, for instance, F12. The boot menu allows selecting the boot device from a list of bootable devices without changing the BIOS setup.

Thanks.

I knew most of that and I'll change the boot order as you say.

I suppose my question is how would I have set the BIOS options if the PC had "died" and I was trying to restore it - before I had changed the boot order.

Sorry! Starting to reach the outer limits of my "very limited" computer knowledge. I'll leave that for the experts!

A machine that has "died" as you put it should still be able to POST (Power On Self Test) which is the step that allows bios access.