Creation of Bootable disc
I have Acronis® True Image™ 2021, which is the precursor to the new office version. I'm backing up the whole C drive to an external hard drive.
My question: Does the back-up process automatically make the external drive a bootable drive? I didn't see an option to select to specify that the external drive would be bootable. I read the "Acronis Survival Kit" page, and it said step 3 was "Select the Make bootable option that appears under the destination panel." I didn't see that option.
So the backup ran successfully, but I don't know if I'll be able to use the backup drive as the boot drive.
Thanks in advance for any advice and guidance provided.

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My question: Does the back-up process automatically make the external drive a bootable drive?
When you create a backup there is an option to create a survival kit, which will add to the USB drive a small FAT32 partition which includes the Acronis recovery media. This is described in the link provided by Daria.
Ian
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Thanks for the feedback. The problem is that although I was offered that option the first time I created a backup on the external hard drive, subsequently that external drive was completely reformatted. When I used that same reformatted drive to create a backup (starting the whole process from the beginning), the second time I was not offered the option of creating the Survival Kit on the drive. And I would like it there. Is there a way to "manually" have the Survival Kit put on the drive?
Thanks
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If you accepted the option of creating a survival kit and this reformatted the drive, then look at the icon now showing when you select the drive as the destination for your backup. If it shows as a disk drive with a large 'A' shown on it, then it is bootable as a survival kit drive.
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Hello Steve,
Poor communication on my part: The acceptance of the option of creating the Survival Kit is not what reformatted the drive. I did that later, for other reasons (after I'd created an initial backup on that drive). Initially the Survival Kit was indeed created on the external drive. It was after I had reformatted the drive that I wasn't shown the option to create a Survival Kit, when I selected to use that drive again. That's why I wasn't sure when I selected it again, if the Survival Kit had been created.
However, I do now see that the selected destination drive (the one in question) does indeed display a large capital A on it (although it does have two cross lines on the "A", which I guess is artistic license).
Thank you for your help.
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Baron, if you look at the contents of the drive in a partition manager (such as the free MiniTool Partition Wizard) then you should see a 2GB FAT32 partition ahead of the main NTFS partition with the WinPE boot files etc.
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Fabulous little tool! Thanks. I checked, and sure enough, that little 2GB FAT partition is right there. Feels good to know it's there.
Thanks again.
Baron
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Curious: The 2GB FAT partition is listed as "Active", not BOOT. Is that what it should be? Sorry if that's a dumb question....
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Baron, when it comes to Acronis there is no such thing as a dumb question. Not sure I have the answer, but I suspect a drive is only shown as boot when it was actually used to boot the system. The partition is bootable but not the boot partition.
Ian
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