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External HARD DRIVES NOT flash drives...

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We have 3 computers in our home. 2 identical HP AMD dual core desktop units running XP Pro media edition, and the companion HP dual core notebook running Vista Home Premium Media Edition.

The notebook is my wife's and she frequently takes it on trips... She just as frequently comes home from these supposedly 4 and 5 star hotels with a notebook infested with virus, trojans, and malware...

After sometimes spending weeks repairing her notebook I finally decided to take a different approach. I purchased 3 licensed for Acronis True Image Home 2011 and a 2 terabyte external drive.

The plan is to keep an updated full image of all 3 machines on the external drive and when the bugs hit, (Or every time she comes home from a trip, in the case of the notebook) I'll just restore the image and we're good to go.

The back-ups and restores work fine. However, what I'd really like is to be able to boot Acronis True Image Home 2011 directly from the USB HARD DRIVE.

Please don't start telling me about how to make bootable usb flash drives... I have dozens!!!

I'm talking specifically about booting from a USB EXTERNAL MAGNETIC MEDIA MECHANICAL HARD DRIVE.

In this case a 2 Terabyte Drive (That means NTFS! Or some version of Linux that will also run the Acronis True Image Home 2011 recovery software).

I've tried Grub, Unetbootin, creating a small fat boot partition (that one almost worked, but the rest of the drive became invisible to the OS), various "Live" Linux distros and nothing seems to want to work...

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

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One place that can be very helpful is the listing of MudCrab's guides on this topic. Click on my signature index below and look at items in the #8 listing--especially the #8-D. The links there also include some troubleshooting information. Should you need further assistance, mostly likely MudCrab will respond to this thread as he monitors this forum as well.

Using his instructions and his webpage, I have created (and use) Acronis bootable usb hard drives; plus I have created a hard drive which is Grub4Dos bootable with options to use any of several different versions of TIH plus using the same disk for backup storage.

Sweet, sounds like just the kind of information I've been searching for!
I'm amazed at all the information on google that says it can't be done!

Thank you, I'll take a look right away!

Remember now, I am talking about Acronis TrueImage bootable drives. In other words, you use the usb hard drive to boot into the same Acronis TrueImage module as you would if you had used a CD or FlashDrive. The beauty of it is that everything is contained in one fixture which is the hard drive.

YES!!
That's exactly what I've been trying to accomplish...
Your posts have a LOT of information :o)
It will take me a while to work through it all, but it looks like really good stuff!
THANK YOU!!

WOW! That was a lot of information! It took me several days to find the time to work through all of it. I used your blank images to make several bootable flash drives that work.

However, I can't get Acronis True Image Home 2011 to make a backup image of the flash drives! It lets me set up the back up just fine but gives me an error whenever I try to run the backup to actually make the image. (tib file)

Does using the Grub4DOS method on the external drive not work for you? It's much more flexible.

I have made several functioning USB flash drives using the Grub4DOS method. However, I have not tried that method directly on the USB-HDD.

One thing I've noticed is that even with the blank images you provided, when recovering them (Whole Disk WITH MBR and sector 0 selected) to the HDD it always wants to put a 1 meg blank space in front of the 1st partition.

Windows does this but so does GPart .

When I get home I'll delete all the partitions on that hard drive and create a small (1gb or less) dos partition, and try the Grub method... perhaps that will work.

Thanks!
~Jim

Grub4DOS works just fine with NTFS. Also, the "blank images" are not needed when using the Grub4DOS method. Are you booting the ISO file using Grub4DOS or setting up a partition? It sounds like you're mixing several different methods.

MudCrab wrote:

.....It sounds like you're mixing several different methods.

No actually, I was just doing a poor job of explaining I had tried several methods all the way through...

However, the 1 method I had not tried was to run Grub4Dos on the actual USB Hard Drive with a single active NTFS partition...
Somehow, I assumed that 2Tb was just too much storage to work that way...

It was not!
Grub4Dos using the boot from img method gets me into acronis with no problem!

I now have a BOOTABLE storage and recovery USB 2Terabyte External Hard Disk Drive!

Thanks for all your help Mudcrab!!!

~Jim