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USB boot drive on older model laptop "Operation System not found".

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I'm using Rufus 3.9 to create an USB boot drive using the True Image 2020's Bootable ISO Image.  The USB boot drive works on newer model laptops but not on older models.

It boots into the True Image 2020 GUI on the newer model laptop.

But I get an error from booting on an older model laptop "Operation System not found".

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William, welcome to these public User Forums.

Sorry but not sufficient information about your older model laptops to understand the issue here?

I have never seen 'Operating System not found' when booting from any Acronis Rescue Media unless using the Acronis Universal Restore which can give that error?

There should be no need to use tools such as Rufus to create Acronis Rescue Media if you have ATI 2020 installed on your computer.  You can create all types of the media using the Rescue Media Builder tool directly on to either CD/DVD or USB stick.

I've had mixed results with Rufus and stopped using it over a year ago due to incompatibility to boot on some systems.  Also, some of my usb flash drives would only boot with other rescue media tools AFTER doing a full format of the drives with 3rd party tools like Minitool Partition Wizard.

I would recommend fully formatting the flash drive and building the rescue media directly in the Acronis application and see if it still has problems booting on those certain machines, or not.

But the same USB boot drive will boot on the newer systems, just not on the old ones.  The new systems use UEFI to boot, and the old ones use BIOS to boot.

So my problem with the ATI 2020 USB boot drive is that it will only work with systems using UEFI and not the ones using BIOS.

William, again, what exactly are these older systems still using Legacy BIOS to boot?

Typically the ATI rescue media if created on a UEFI system will be 64-bit WinPE which will never work on any older 32-bit Legacy systems.

All rescue media is capable of both UEFI and Legacy boot.

See KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

That's the issue I had with Rufus, it tweaks the drives bootloader and causes boot issues on some systems (primarily older ones)

Use diskpart in Windows and "clean" the USB drive - be careful to wipe the correct drive - it will lose all data! 

Then go into Windows disk manager and initiate the USB drive as MBR (it can still boot on UEFI systems).  Format it as Fat32.

Go into Acronis and build the rescue media directly.  Try to boot it on the new and old machines now.

Also, how big is the flash drive?