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How To Create Bootable FAT32 Recovery Disk On Small Partition Of USB External Hard Drive?

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I have version 14.0 and tried following this guide, but it is for older version. I want to backup bootable recovery Acronis Flash Drive that i created and then restore it to external hard drive FAT32 partition, but since i don't see Flash Drive in disks and partitions dialog, all i can do is backup file-by-file and not sector-by-sector. I want to have bootable Acronis recovery FAT32 partition and NTFS partition on my external USB hard drive for backups.

How to do that?

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Have you tried using Grub4DOS? It's easy to setup an external drive to boot to TI and it doesn't require a dedicated partition.

I have True Image 2016 and would like to set up external hard drive for backup and boot.  If I purchase a 1tb drive to use solely for this purpose, will the entire drive need to be formated fat32 or partioned? HELP

Hello Edison,

Acronis True Image 2016 is not capable of creating bootable external USB HDD "out of the box". There are following options:

A) If your Windows is booting in non-UEFI mode, you can follow instructions from sections 1 and 3 at http://www.themudcrab.com/acronis_grub4dos.php to set up the disk for backup and boot. You will not need neither to partition disk nor format it in FAT32 in this case.

B) If your system is booting in UEFI mode, option A will not work. In such case you can choose WinPE option in Acronis Rescue Media Builder, follow on-screen instructions and when asked for file type, choose WIM format. Store resulting .WIM file somewhere. Follow instructions from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825045.aspx till the title "Install Windows PE to the Media", then replace C:\WinPE_amd64\media\sources\boot.wim with .wim file that you have made with Acronis, and follow the rest of instructions from that page. As a result you will have two partitions on external disk: small 2GB FAT32 partition will contain Acronis and WinPE boot files, and the rest of the drive will be NTFS-formatted, where you can store your backups.

Regards,

Slava

Hi Edison,

The work-a-round I've used is to create bootable media to a USB flash drive first.  Then take an image of it with Acronis.  Then push the image back to your external USB hard drive.  You know have a bootalble USB hard drive with Acronis.  FYI, if you do this, by default your hard drive will get wiped/formatted as FAT32.

You may want to first parition the drive so that there is about 1GB of free space at the beginning of the drive (use partionminifree if need be).  You can then do the same process to just that first parition, leaving the remainng data on your drive intact and/or formatted with NTFS. 

I routinley do this so I have one external hard drive where I can boot to Acronis recovery media with and then take my backups and store them on the same drive (or restore them from that drive).