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Making a bootable image to thumb drive

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I have Acronis True Image 2016 and want to make a bootable image of a newly installed Window 10 system with my applications using a 32 GB USB thumb drive. I am new user and I thought I could do this with the thumb drive however it keeps telling me I need a drive the same size as my source drive. Can someone tell me if I can do this with a thumb drive? If so can someone tell me how?

 

 

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Wayne, welcome to these user forums.

With ATIH 2016 you can make a bootable Acronis Rescue Media USB stick or you can make a backup image of your Windows 10 system on USB media, but you cannot make a bootable image of your Windows 10 system - Windows does not allow USB devices to boot the OS regardless of whether it is possible to do this or not.

For the Acronis Rescue Media you could use a 1GB USB stick and this can be done from within the ATIH 2016 application by clicking on Tools then selecting the Rescue Media Builder option - you should already have plugged in the USB stick to allow Acronis to offer you the option to use this media.

For the backup of your Windows 10 system, then you can either do this from within Windows 10 using ATIH 2016 or you can boot from the USB Rescue Media and do it outside of Windows.  You will need a further drive to store the backup image on, either internal or external.

Wayne...welcome to the forums.

I believe your idea would work, as long as the data on your hard drive is less than approximately 29Gb.  I did a trial run using a 32 Gb thumb drive...created a Linux rescue media on the thumb drive...booted the thumb drive to verify it would boot.  Then create a new folder on the thumb drive.  Then boot the thumb drive & performed a file/folder backup using the new folder on the thumb drive as the destination.  I could not do a disk/partition backup as my disk has too much data on it.

Your backup should be a disk mode backup using full partition list.  Picture 1 below.  I would recommend performing a disk mode backup to another hard drive to verify the size of the .tib file...just to make sure the file will fit on the thumb drive.

Please let us know if this works for you.

Edit...after re-reading your original post, it sounds like you are trying to make a clone of your hard disk to a USB thumb drive.  I believe this is not possible.  Using the method I describe above, you would have a backup (.tib file) located on the thumb drive, that could be restored if your hard drive crashed.  

If you are looking for a portable windows on a USB thumb drive, then your should research Win 2 Go.

Regards,

FtrPilot

 

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