Booting from an External USB Hard Drive

[SeattleKen]

I've been using Acronis True Image for some time now with great success. I use it on my Tablet PC, which has no internal CD drive. I keep an up-to-date image on a very portable USB external hard drive. As I'm frequently on the road without a CD-ROM or floppy drive, I've succeeded in converting a USB flash key into a bootable emergency rescue media in case I need to reimage my PC while on the road. I then boot off the USB key and restore the image from my portable external USB hard drive. The trouble is that it frequently doesn't spot the USB hard drive (it's very hit-or-miss with the rescue version of True Image; by contrast, running True Image from inside XP always sees my external USB hard drive).

I'd like to streamline the process even further and somehow get the computer to boot off of a small partition on my external hard drive and automatically launch True Image. If anyone has succeeded in making a USB hard drive into a bootable media for TI, I'd sure love to know how you did it.

[interesteduser]

bump. i'd like to know how to boot from a usb drive too.

i managed to get acronis to write the boot image to my usb key, but it won't boot in any of my machines that support usb hdd booting.

what i'd like to do is boot from a usb drive, and maybe even backup/restore from it. i could get my company to purchase a corporate license if we could do this, as it would save us a lot of trouble when cloning servers.

or has anyone had any luck booting from/writing to a usb cd-rw or dvd-rw drive, i guess if i could boot from the boot cd in a usb drive, then i could backup/restore over the network...

[GlobalForce]

Gentlemen (assuming the other),

Have a look at these pages and see if they fit the bill....WeetHet (http://www.weethet.nl/english/hardware_bootfromusbstick.php), PCStats (http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1676&page=1), and UCSU Colorado (http://ucsu.colorado.edu/~shaher/Bootable_USB.html).
As long as you're motherboards BIOS supports USB booting, you should be in.


GF

[rhodesy]

I'm trying to use the pcstats page and when I use the HP tool is says Volume Too Large :( I'ts a 40GB external hdd. Anything i can do?

Thanks :)