Restoring from Bootable - ............
I have an external hard drive (the MY PASSPORT) ... I was hoping to make it bootable but apparently Acronis can only make things bootable if they are in FAT32 format.
So do I have to back all my stuff up to this external drive, AND get a disk and put the boot stuff onto? That's extremely inconvenient. Windows wont let me format the Passport to FAT32 ... only ExFAT and Acronis wont support that.
So what do I do?
I dont want to have to keep track of two things just to do a restore in case of emergency.
And my laptop DOES NOT have a disk drive included in it. The new Vaio has an external CDROM docking station. So now we're looking at (1) The external drive (2) The CD disk (3) Must have my docking station with me .... just to do a restore. Not good. Especially if I am traveling.
Kevin:
There are ways to do this if you're willing to invest a little time. I'm assuming that you want to have your Passport drive do double duty by being able to boot from it to run the Acronis Rescue media and then back up to the Passport drive and/or restore from it to your laptop. Correct?
If this is correct you create an ISO image file of the Acronis Bootable Media but don't burn it to a CD. Instead, copy it to your Passport drive. You then install Grub4DOS, which is a boot manager, to the Passport drive making it bootable. When you boot from this drive you can select the Acronis bootable media as the operating system that you'd like to boot to. Grub4DOS allows booting ISO image files directly. It's quite simple to do and works very well.
Here is an article with the details by forum MVP MudCrab: http://www.themudcrab.com/acronis_grub4dos.php
By the way, you should format your Passport drive as NTFS for best reliability. FAT file systems are not very robust.
I wasn't aware that Grub4DOS would allow booting from an external HD. I thought it was only for flash drives.
Thanks for the info,, Mark.
It's a pretty versatile little program. Besides using it on external hard disks, I also have a copy on the main internal hard disks of all of my PCs. It's then very simple to copy the ISO image file of your favorite rescue CD (Knoppix Linux, Acronis True Image and/or Disk Director, Parted Magic, Windows Home Server recovery, etc.) and choose which to boot from when the PC boots. This is especially handy for a laptop because then you don't need to lug along ANY external flash drives or hard drives when traveling.
I used Xboot to create bootable USB flash drives with a menu to multiple ISOs. It's actually built on Grub4DOS , but is easier to setu. I just wasn't aware that it could be used to boot from an external HD.
Thank you Ill give that a try. Is there any concern that the physical hardware / BIOS will not recognize a USB connected device though?
As a sample yesterday I set the boot priority to "External Device" as first and it didn't even try .. it just went straight into windows.
Does your BIOS have a boot option for USB drive or Removable drive?
Kevin:
If there wasn't anything to boot to on the external disk then the behavior you observed during your test may have been normal. But if it does turn out that your BIOS won't allow booting from USB devices then you can always install Grub4DOS to your laptop's hard disk drive and boot into the Acronis Recovery Environment that way.
Alternatively, the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (ASRM), an option in True Image, was designed expressly for this purpose and requires only activating the feature. Personally, I haven't liked relying on the ASRM ever since Acronis moved the files needed to run the recovery manager to the Windows partition (in older True Image versions the ASRM files were on a separate partition). If the Windows partition gets damaged then the feature won't work. That's not reliable enough for me.