system image/duel boot
I just purchased Acronis True image. I was told at Microcenter that I can use this as a duel boot set-up. I want to move everythimg from my old hard drive to the new hard drive, and be able to go back and forth between systems. Old has Win 7 with a lot of kids games and tests from Cisco classes. I just want to keep seperate. I was told to image old sys onto external hard drive, then load onto new HD with Acronis. I read that software was only good for one usage or something of that nature. I guess i need to load Acronis onto old disk to set up SI. I just wanted to keep everything on one HD but this is what was suggested. Ray


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Thank you. I am putting system image onto external drive (from first HD which I plan on disconnecting, but leaving in computer). I have new Win 10 already installed on new HD in same computer, but is not connected right now. Once I boot to new HD and connect to external drive, can I just "switch" between OS's or will I have to create dual boot? I guess you call it multi-boot. I just want to keep grandson's games and experiments away from my learning based environment! Ray PS It is a God-send to talk to someone who actually knows for sure what they are doing.
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You won't be able to boot Windows from an external USB drive unless you have used Enterprise Windows 2 go or a 3rd party solution that mimics the process (although would go agains Windows licensing)
Dual boot really varies from system to system. In most cases, if both drives are connected at the same, from a "cold" boot, the bios will detect the OS on each drive and add it to the bootmanager - not always though and seems to work better with Windows 8.1 and 10 than Windows 7 or XP. If you want to dual boot, you'll want to ensure both drives are connected internally and you may want to try out easybcd which is a very easy to use bootmanager.
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Thanks. You are correct unfortunately. There is always virtual machine. I guess Win has some new features I beforeneed to more money sorry about text. ray
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The problem with VM's is they show up as different firmware/hadware so you can only license one VM at a time.
Perhaps, instead of dual boot, you could consider a hot-swappable drive bay. These plug into the internal sata port, but use one of the 5.25" slots on your PC so you can pop out drive 1 and pop in drive 2 relatively easy to switch between your OSes.
If you use a mix of 2.5" and 3.5" drives, this one works well - kind of ugly, but highly functional: http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=141
If you use only 2.5" drives (like SSD's or laptop size drives) they have a nice dual bay and also a 4 bay kit as well. http://www.icydock.com/goods_cat.php?id=147
Overall though, if you can stand the look of it, I'd go with the one above since it's the most versatile with capability to quickly connect 2.5" or 3.5" drives (one at a time). This takes all the guess work out of a dual boot/multiboot sytsem.
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Good idea. A whoe lot less technical. I been swapping them internally if I need a practice test or something that I cant reload. My gaming case has a bay on top on the outside I think its for a laptop HD. Never used it. I have an external HD (1 TB). I was thinking about system imaging old drive onto this. Its brand new, no data at all on it. Thing is can I boot from SI? I could set boot order in BIOS. Dont know if it matters, but it has a USB cord. Thanks for interest. Ray. PS My machine is a clone of yours, down to MOBO. No cloud though. Oh and the SSDs. Sound pretty tits if you dont mind me saying that.
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Good idea. A whoe lot less technical. I been swapping them internally if I need a practice test or something that I cant reload. My gaming case has a bay on top on the outside I think its for a laptop HD. Never used it. I have an external HD (1 TB). I was thinking about system imaging old drive onto this. Its brand new, no data at all on it. Thing is can I boot from SI? I could set boot order in BIOS. Dont know if it matters, but it has a USB cord. Thanks for interest. Ray. PS My machine is a clone of yours, down to MOBO. No cloud though. Oh and the SSDs. Sound pretty tits if you dont mind me saying that.
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Ray, if I understand your question, you are asking if you can boot from an external 1TB HDD and the answer is no, this is not an Acronis restriction, but one imposed by Microsoft who do not permit external drives to be bootable.
If your question is to ask if you can boot from an Acronis system image, i.e. a file with the extension .TIB, then the answer is also No - this is just a container file akin to a zip file and is not bootable.
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