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Software will not allow my media to be bootable

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I am trying to make a bootable clone of my hard drive and I can't get the Acronis software to to make my drive drive bootable. Any thoughts?

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My best advice: Do not Clone! Instead, do one extra step and create a full disk Backup to an external drive. If ever you need to return to that image state, you would do a full disk Restore/Recovery.

There is rarely a need to Clone. Really, Backup is safer and more flexible. Many users encounter problems Cloning which they would not have if they had instead used Backup.

1. Don't use Clone. Do a full disk mode Backup, selecting the entire disk, and a Restore. The end result will be the same as Clone, but with many advantages.

2. Check out the many user guides and tutorials in the left margin of this forum, particularly Getting Started and Grover's True Image Guides which are illustrated with step-by-step screenshots.
29618: Grover's new backup and restore guides http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618

A full disk backup, selecting the disk checkbox rather than individual partitions, includes everything. It includes everything that a clone would include.

The difference is that while a clone immediately writes that information a single time to another drive, a backup is saved as a compressed .tib archive. As such, multiple .tib archives may be saved to a single backup drive, allowing for greater redundancy, security and flexibility.

Once a full disk image .tib archive is restored to a drive, the result is the same as if that drive had been the target of a clone done on the date and time that the backup archive was created.

Clone is riskier because we've seen situations where users mistakenly choose the wrong drive to clone from and to, thus wiping out their system drive.

William,

I agree with Tuttle, but if you wish to go ahead using the clone method you must make sure that the source and desination drive are not connected at the same time on first reboot. Secondly, if your PC is a laptop or something like a Gateway PC, you actually may need to 'reverse' clone due to the special disk layout and BIOS' those machines often use.

To 'reverse' clone requires the source drive to be removed from the machine and inserted into an external caddy and then the destination drive installed into the machine, then boot from the recovery CD and clone external to internal.

Just a note, all cloning and recovery of any partition/drive containing the OS should always be started from the recovery CD, that way Windows never gets in the way.

Thanks for the helpful hints. The one variable I did not add is that I am doing this on a Mac. I am trying to build an image so that I don't have to go through the whole process of installing parallels and all that goes with it on my mac. I was hoping to just be able to boot off of an external drive and move the clone/full backup to another Mac. I have everything installed on a laptop and I'm trying to move this to a tower.

Do you still suggest I just do a full back up or is cloning the better way to go??

Is there anyway to make a bootable windows disk on a firewire drive?? It seems like this can't be done....Any ideas?