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Multiple system images on one boot disk

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Beginner
Posts: 1
Comments: 1

Hi everyone,

 

I've purchased a 5 PC license of True Image 2019. I'm using 2 PC's, one Microsoft Surface and one laptop computer. I also have an External USB 3.0 Harddisk 4TB. I partitioned this external HD so that I have 2 partitions: one partition of 1TB and one partition of 3TB. What I want to do is:

1. Make the 1TB partition bootable (win10)

2. Make a full system backup of my 4 computers and store these 4 backup files also on the 1TB partition

In case of a full system restore, I want to plug in the external HD, boot from it and select the correct full system backup (out of the 4). Is this possible?

0 Users found this helpful

Roland, welcome to these public User Forums.

Unless you have an Enterprise license for Windows 10 that will let you create a Windows To Go bootable OS partition on your external drive, then you will not be able to boot from it.

With Acronis 2019 & later, you do have an option of creating an Acronis Survival Kit  on the external drive, which creates a 2GB FAT32 partition at the start of the drive for booting into the Acronis Rescue environment to perform Backup & Recovery operations, where you can store your backup images on the remainder of the drive. See the following documents.

KB 61639: Acronis True Image 2019: How to create Acronis Survival Kit

KB 61738: Acronis True Image 2019: Survival Kit disk partition for backups is limited to 2TB on BIOS-booted systems

Article: The Acronis Survival Kit

Beginner
Posts: 1
Comments: 1

Yes! I managed to make it work:

First I formatted my 4TB external HDD as GPT disk / ntsf partition. Next, I let True Image 2019 create this HDD bootable. As expected, a 2TB MBR partition was created. However, is was not possible using a partition manager to create a volume of the other 2TB. After some experimenting I managed to convert the disk from MBR to GPT and resizing the first 2TB to a 0.5TB partition. Then I also managed to resize the second 2TB to 3.5TB partition. After rebooting, my external HDD is still bootable and the 2 partitions available (0.5 and 3.5TB). Finally I made my 4 images and stored them on the 0.5TB partition and checked if they are selectable after booting. All functions well

Glad to hear you have got a working solution here!  Thanks for sharing your feedback.