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Restoring to a blank drive

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Here is my situation:

I want to make a complete backup of an internal HDD (with Win 7) to a USB HDD, with MRB partition and everything. My concern is whether I can then restore from that USB HDD to a blank internal HDD, including the MRB.

I am not sure how to test whether that would work, since this is a hypothetical situation in case an internal HDD dies. Do I need to create a MRB partition on the USB HDD before I do the backup?

I have been trying to do a restore to a second USB HDD, with the hope that I can then boot up from that USB drive. I followed directions I found online to make a MRB partition, but attempts to boot from the restored drive failed; It seemed to be starting Windows 7 normally, but then flashed a quick screen whose contents I could not read before the screen disappeared, and then it booted from the C: drive.

So, it seems as if I am missing a step somewhere. Any advice?

 

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Lannie, there are two completely different options that can be used here.

If you are making a full backup image of your internal Windows 7 HDD and storing this on your external USB drive, then you just select the full drive as the source which includes all partitions, MBR etc.  The external drive will contain the .TIB image file storing all of this information, which you can then recover when needed using the Acronis recovery media.

If you are looking to make an exact copy of your internal Windows 7 HDD on your external USB drive, then you are in effect making a Clone of the internal drive and duplicating it complete contents onto the external drive.  To use the cloned drive, you would remove the internal drive and replace it with the cloned drive in order to boot from it.
It is unlikely that you would be able to boot the external USB drive directly while attached via USB.

I know that it is possible to boot from an external USB drive; when I accidentally leave my USB thumb drive plugged in while booting, it starts to boot from that and then complains (rightly) that it couldn't find an OS. I just haven't figured out how to do that from a USB HDD.

It is possible to boot from an external USB drive and I have done this myself, however, if you have cloned your internal drive to the external USB drive, then this is very likely to conflict with the internal drive because they are both identical, down to the drive identifier.

 

No, you won't be able to clone from the internal disk to the USB drive and boot from the USB - Windows will not allow this natively.  The solution for Windows booting form a USB drive is Windows2Go which is an Entprise feature.  However, there are third party "free" tools that will allow you to do this with any Windows installer as well.  Going that route though means a new Windows build on your USB drive using some form of Windows2Go creator.  Keep in mind that OEM Windows licenses don't qualify for Windows2Go builds either.  To be legit with the licensing, you'd have to have a stand-a-lone version of the OS that could be transferred to your Windows2go bootable drive, and you would no longer technically be able to use that license on another computer.  

In your situation, if you don not use Windows2Go, itt would only work if you could then take out the drive from the external USB enclosure and replace the existing internal primary drive.  If this is your plan, it should work, but I would still test to make sure.  There's no risk in data loss since you'd still have the original drive to revert back to if it did not work for some reason.

Altneratively, you should take a full disk image of your main drive (with Acronis) and save the backup files to the external USB drive.  You could then restore that image to your main internal hard drive in the event of some type of OS failure or a need to go back to that point in time.  You could also use that image to deploy to a new drive (for instance, if you were to upgrade the main drive from a spinning drive to an SSD).  However, this would still not give you the ability to boot Windows from a USB device.