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backing whole drive and restoring on external drive

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I backed up my c:\ drive and then tried to restore on a 500gb external usb drive. It appears to have restored everything but the usb will not boot in. Can anyone help please.

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Colin,

Windows is designed not to boot from USB devices. What you might be able to do is the following.

1. Download Microsoft Windows Virtual PC (which is free and you get to run XP on W7 as well). This is mainly if you are not running W7 Ultimate or Essentials.

2. Convert the Acronis tib file to VHD

2a. If running W7 Ult or ESS you will have an option under Tools and Utilities tab, Protection Tools, to add the VHD via the Boot Sequence Manager to your installed BCD. This will allow you to boot from VHD - whether Windows will still sulk because it's on a USB drive via the BCD I'm not sure, as I use a VM to do this.

3. Attach the VHD to Virtual PC this will run the VHD from a USB disk. However the catch here is that you have to boot into your main OS to start the virtual PC.

Hi,

my Windows 7 (Home Premium, 64 Bit) and Notebook HP Pavilion dv8 boots from USB, so Windows 7 is designed to boot from USB. You have to set the partition on your USB hard drive to active.