USB or External Removable drive to Boot and Restore from
I would like to be able to boot to, and then restore from a large USB Drive.
I have tried using both a 64Gig Flash Drive, and a 500Gig External USB Drive, and Acronis will not create bootable media on either.
For both drives, I created a 1Gig Fat32 partition for Acronis to create it's boot partition on, with drive letter E:
The remaining partition as drive letter F:
When I go into Acronis to create bootable media, neither drive shows up.
Only when I use a smaller drive, such as an 8Gig Flash drive formated Fat32 does it show up and allow me to create it as bootable.
Is there a way to do what I want? I would like to just have a single drive that I can boot to, and then restore my image from.
This can be done but not using TrueImage.
Click link #1 below and look at index items 4-C and 4-D.
Yes, but when I partition, the first partition is only 1Gig, and formated as FAT32. So Acronis shoud see it as a drive it can create a boot partition too.
Same as a large hard drive that you can partition. Windows boots to the primary boot partition. The other partitions are available for storage and independant of the boot partition.
My method is intended as another way of achieving the same goal.
Perhaps your method will work. Good luck.
My example:
I have an 750GB internal disk plus an 1.5TB external disk both confiure as a single partition NTFS.
I then configured both to boot into Grub4Dos.
In my Grub4Dos configuration, I loaded several recent versions of TreuImage iso files.
I chage the BIOS to boot into usb which boots into Grub4Dos.
Then , from the Menu, I select which version of TrueImage is to boot.
Aftter TrueImage boots from the iso file, I can then backup or restore a prior backup.
My prior link of 4C is the method use to achieve the above.
Sections 1 and 3 of 4C are applicable.
Don't forget that USB flash and hard drives may not always report themselves as hard disks to Windows, this make a big difference in how they behave and how TI sees them. Flash drives in particular can be made to imitate hard drives (so long as they are not hardcoded in firmware to report themselves as removable) there are ways to fool Windows into thinking the flash drives are hard disks by formatting them as NTFS and have the formatter add a hidden partition to the drive.
RMPrepUSB can do this for you with flash drives and it uses Grub4Dos if you wish to go to ISO booting as mentioned by GroverH, the HP USB flash drive utility can prepare a flash drive as well. As for actual USB hard drives, I partition those into two partitions, one of about 300MB where the recovery environment is stored and the other partition is where I store the images.
Mudcrab has produced a PDF file showing how to do this, if you can't find it in a forum search, I'll hunt it down and attach it to my next post.