Flash Drive Recovery Media Does Not Boot

I have used Paragon Backup and Recovery for a couple of years with the recovery media on CD and recently using a bootable flash drive on a Netbook without a CD.

An HP Elitebook has been upgraded to a OCZ Agility 3 SSD with the former HHD now in a caddy in place of the DVD drive. I am using Backup and Recovery 2012 Free and created bootable Recovery Media on a 2GB Sandisk flash drive.

When attempting to boot from this flash drive the laptop freezes at the HP screen with "Press ESC to enter setup" and will respond to nothing except power off.

Same thing happens when using the 128MB flash drive created and working correctly on the Netbook. (B&R 2011).

Edit - Another HP Elitebook, with conventional HDD, also locks up, so the problem seems not to be related to SSD.

The laptop boots correctly from Win7 and Ubuntu 11.10 OS on flash drives when the boot order is USB HDD first.

I suspect that it is the presence of the SSD that is the route of the problem.

Can anyone help to explain this? Better still propose a solution?

 

If you have paid version of the B&R 2011 please try to use WinPE-based recovery CD (available as separate download from My Account- My Downloads) and re-create the bootable flash. The issue might be related to missing drivers in Linux version which could be easily added to WinPE Recovery CD.

 

Thanks for response.

I have only Free versions at present of BR 2011 and 2012 so cannot try WinPE.

However removing the 2nd HDD, refitting the DVD drive and creating a Recovery CD from the Linux iso works OK, allowing the laptop to be booted from CD and an image made of the SSD to an external disc.

Problem appears to be in the creation of the bootable flash drive. Surely the iso has suitable flash drive drivers?

Are there are special requirements for the flash drive? Any known makes the do/do not work? Does it need to be prepared (formatted) in any particular way prior to burning the iso? Any other tricks?

 

Actually, you could build your own bootable Windows Preinstallation Environment if you wish using something like Winbuilder from http://reboot.pro/ and add to it whatever device drivers and "rescue utilities" (including Paragon freebies) that you want. Ready-made projects are available for scripted building with any PE1 (WinXP/2003), PE2 (Vista) and/or PE3 (Win7) source that you have available and (unlike Mickeysoft's own recovery environment) they'll also support WOW64 if needed.

Paragon's latest Hard Disk Manager 11 Suite works beautifully that way. No reason why their Backup and Recovery proggy shouldn't work equally well in a similar WinPE environment. They've made them really "portable" now without needing any clunky device class filters for bypassing the OS HAL. Great development effort!