Clone bootable?

Hi from a new user...I just cloned my hard drive to a USB drive expecting the latter to be bootable (my BIOS does have that option) but my PC wouldn't boot from the USB drive. Should I be surprised by this?

I've seen some discussion in another thread about backup strategies and I was intending to go down the bootable clone route but maybe I should revisit that.

Secondary question if I may - assuming I have a boot cd and a full TI backup image, will I need to reinstal programs in the event of a hard disk failure assuming I instal a new drive in the same PC?

Thanks

Peter

 

The cloning feature is by no means perfect. What version and build of TI are you using? Have you been able to boot from the usb device before?

For your second question, that is precisely the purpose of programs like TI - you should be able to put in a brand new drive and Restore your image to it and have the new drive work just like the old.

 

Hello Peter,

I'm not absolutely sure but it could be that Windows doesn't natively boot from a USB HD. Check out this <previous thread>.

Regards

 

Thanks for your replies. It looks like the best strategy is to back up to an image - I guess I like the thought of being able to "prove" immediately that my back-up solution has worked - rebooting from the USB drive would have served that purpose if it could be done - and it looks like XP won't allow it.

I don't suppose anyone out there knows how straightforward it is to set up a new drive in the PC if the current one fails? - I'm not very knowledgeable about my PC's innards and I've seen worrying references to 'jumpers' and the like. Clearly I'll need a TI boot CD but do I have to do anything clever with the drive other than simply insert it in the appropriate slot that the old one came out of??!!

Peter

 

If you have your main drive installed in a removeable tray/rack system, this would let you create your clone on the usb drive, then you would shutdown, pull out the tray, remove the main drive, and replace it with the clone in order to try it. This way you wouldn't have to open up the case of your system.

The clone, when it was in the usb case, would already have been set to Master, so no need to worry about jumpers.

The tray/rack pair would cost about $10 to $15 in the US.