Alternative to Acronis Startup Recovery Manager

I have an ancient Toshiba laptop that I plan to use for experimentation. The problem is that the CD-ROM on the machine has died and the machine is ancient enough that it cannot boot from USB (apparently, it can boot from a PXE network, but I don't know how to set one up). Because of this, the only way I can recover is to take out the drive and hook it up to my server via USB.

I thought of using Acronis's StartUp Recovery Manager that allows you to boot from hidden partition. However, it required me to setup a secure zone on the hard disk to store the archive files. I don't really need a secure zone. I back up the files to a remote server or usb external. Is there a way to setup Acronis so that the secure zone only holds the Acronis software?

Alternatively, I was thinking that may be I can install Acronis recovery CD into a partition and then use Grub or Lilo to launch it. Has anyone tried this?

Paul

 

If your laptop has a floppy disk drive you can put the bootable rescue media onto floppies instead of CD

 

Well Duh!

I guess I assumed that the boot disk wouldn't fit on a floppy. I'll try it when I get home.

Paul

 

You need at least 6 floppies but the option is there when you select create bootable rescue media
To keep it at minimum just tick the Acronis True Image "Full version" box

 

Yes. Just set up the secure zone and make it the minimum size possible. Then don't use it to store backups.

 

I investigated the floppy option and it is not feasible, since Acronis will write it on 10 floppies.

I'll try to play around with the secure zone.

Paul