Making Multiple Clones To HDD And Then Booting From It
I want to clone 3 laptops (2 Dell & 1 HP) and 1 desktop (Compaq) to a single USB hard drive (2.5" PATA).
I understand that cloning creates a duplicate copy (with boot parameters) to a partition.
After I complete the cloning process......I plan to remove the USB hard drive's enclosure and install it one my laptops.
My question is that will I be able to boot from the target hard drive since it will contain 4 different partitions and just select a partition to boot from.

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Sal:
A clone creates a duplicate copy of an entire disk; not of a partition. Therefore you cannot have more than one clone on a disk at a time.
Instead, you should create an image of each disk. An image is a file that contains all of the information necessary to restore a disk to the point in time that the image was created. Images are compressed, and only include used sectors on the source disk, so you can indeed store more than one image on a single disk. For example, an image of my entire 160 GB laptop PC's disk, which includes 7 partitions (Windows 7, Linux, boot ISOs, Data, etc) occupies 20 GB.
USB external drives are ideal for storing your backup images. When it comes time to restore, the restoration process will use the image file to re-create the target disk as a copy of the source disk.
Read some of the guides by GroverH (a "sticky" post at the top of the forum) to understand more about the difference between cloning and imaging.
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Thank you very much for your help guys. I didn't even think about the different hardware configurations.
I think I will use the imaging function.
One last question please. Since I have 4 different computers........do I have to install Acronis to all 4 computers to create an image of each hard drive?
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Sal:
Not necessarily. You can also do backups and restores from the bootable Acronis recovery CD. To make one, look for the "Bootable Media Builder" menu item. But there are licensing issues to consider (one copy of the software is only licensed for one PC).
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