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Recover Flash with programs and data too?

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I've got a C, D, and E drive.  I'd like to create a bootable recovery flash which contains the OS, program, and data from C&D (those two will fit on one flash :)  Should I first create a recovery flash and then backup C&D on the same flash?

 

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Alan,

Windows cannot boot off of a flash drive (Microsoft limitation - Windows2go is their solution and you can do this with 3rd party tools though.  By default, it won't work though).

In this scenario, the best you could do is to create your bootable recovery media on your flash drive (do that first since the process formats and wipes the drive first).  You could then boot to the recovery media and take a backup of the hard drive and save it to the flash drive.  You could then restore that image to another drive as you see fit.  However, the backup will be in Acronis.tib format and not something that you can just grab files out of and/or boot too.

For me, I use an external full USB hard drive.  I format it it with a 1Gb parittion for Acronis boot media.  I then create a USB flash drive, take a backup of it and restore the backup to the 1Gb parition.  This gives it a bootable Acronis recovery partition.  The other parition is for the backup data files and/or other working files on the drive since it's just like any other data hard drive.  The caveat is that Acronis won't allow you to create bootable media on a non "removable" drive, (external USB drives are labeled as "fixed disks" in Windows).  So, the work-a-round is to create the recovery on a flash drive first and then back that up and retore it to the external hard drive.

I only suggest this method instead of using a flash drive because even thoguh you can parition as flash drive, Windows will only ever see the first parition.  Also, by partitioning the external USB drive, so that Acronis media is on its own, whenever you need to recreate that media or update it, you don't have to wipe/format the entire drive - just the Acronis parition part.

 

Alan,

Please see post: 117542: [CUSTOMER ADVICE] Using USB sticks with more than 32GB will not be bootable which may affect your decisions here.

You may want to consider creating a 1GB FAT32 partition on any bootable flash drive to use for the Acronis recovery media and then have a second larger NTFS partition to hold your backup images.

Thanks Steve, forgot about that one too!  

Just curious, is Windows able to see any second parittion on your flash drives (if you have any partitioned).  I've never gotten that to work the way I wanted, but havent' tried since moving to Windows 10 (so probably at least a year ago).  I found parition limitation of flash drives as described here:

http://www.tenforums.com/drivers-hardware/27018-possible-create-multipl…

There are 2 types of USB sticks. One is recognized as Removable, the other as Basic disk. So it depends on what firmware the stick has. Here's the screen shot of the 2's. Disk 6 & 7 are both 16GB Sandisk Cruzer. Disk 7 is regconized as Basic disk then you can use Disk Management to create a new partition and normally this type of disk is used to create "Windows to go".

Hi Bob, you are correct as far as my regular USB flash memory sticks are concerned, they show up as Removable and therefore Windows Disk Management offers no options for partitioning!

If I attempt this with AOMEI Partition Assistant then I get the warning per the attached screen shot!

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