Cloning to external USB?

Have a second HD in my Desktop setup as Slave and have succesfully cloned it.
Just added a third HD to an external EIDE WD mounted into an external USB case.
The HD is formated, recognized by TI and I can create an image of my primary C drive into this external.
When tried to create a Clone everything is OK until reboot time, I get an error message "Disk not found" press any key to return to Windows.
Question is:
Is it possible to clone a disk with this setup?
I wanted to have a clone disk ready to go in case of failure in addition to the one already have setup inside as a slave.
thanks
David
EMachine
WIN XP Home
SP2
TI V.8.0 Build 786

 

Have you configured your BIOS to recognise this device as a Boot device ?

 

This is an "external USB, they are not bootable.
However I did find a very similar question posted by "Michael23" and response by Popov just recently.
Perhaps my question now has to do with his recommendation to update to Build 937 without knowing the potential risk to do this update.
Thank you
David

 

1) You should not clone to another drive and then restart the machine with that cloned drive in place. You should always electrically remove either the new clone or the original drive - not run both at once.

2) When you clone a drive you are not storing an image on it, you are actually duplicating the original drive. That's different than creating an image of the original drive and storing the image on another drive.

3) From what you said you wanted to do, that is to have a spare hard drive ready to slip into place at any time, you should create your clone and electrically set it aside so it's not live in any way. Otherwise, you can bet on corruption of both operating systems if you run with both alive at the same time.

4) You can clone to an external USB drive but you should not restart with the cloned drive attached or you will experience the corruption of both drives or at least confusion of the operating system as to which drive is the real C drive even if you force different letters.

You might want to give some thought to creating an image of your internal drive, store it on an external drive and then, if disaster hits, boot from your TI cd and restore the stored image to the drive it was created from. This is a backup strategy I have used with great success and it has proven much easier and faster than creating, storing and installing a clone drive when it hits the fan.

PS - I use 937 and 826 with equally satisfactory results. 937 has better clone management features.

Good luck.

 

>>You might want to give some thought to creating an image of your internal drive, store it on an external drive and then, if disaster hits, boot from your TI cd and restore the stored image to the drive it was created from. This is a backup strategy I have used with great success and it has proven much easier and faster than creating, storing and installing a clone drive when it hits the fan.

Can this be done if the original internal drive has suffered a mechanical failure of any sort?

 

Thank you both
David

 

Yes, with limits. If your internal drive goes bad and you replace it with a new one you should be able to restore the image to the replacement drive with no trouble.

But, when you create the image to begin with, you must have created an image of the entire hard drive for it to be rebootable. If you simply create an image of a partition and then try to restore it to a replacement hard drive it won't boot.

 

Excellent post. bobdat
This answered all my questions about backing up with a USB harddrive.

Thanks very much.
Kenos1.

PS excuse top posting.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

QUOTE=bobdat]1) You should not clone to another drive and then restart the machine with that cloned drive in place. You should always electrically remove either the new clone or the original drive - not run both at once.

2) When you clone a drive you are not storing an image on it, you are actually duplicating the original drive. That's different than creating an image of the original drive and storing the image on another drive.

3) From what you said you wanted to do, that is to have a spare hard drive ready to slip into place at any time, you should create your clone and electrically set it aside so it's not live in any way. Otherwise, you can bet on corruption of both operating systems if you run with both alive at the same time.

4) You can clone to an external USB drive but you should not restart with the cloned drive attached or you will experience the corruption of both drives or at least confusion of the operating system as to which drive is the real C drive even if you force different letters.

You might want to give some thought to creating an image of your internal drive, store it on an external drive and then, if disaster hits, boot from your TI cd and restore the stored image to the drive it was created from. This is a backup strategy I have used with great success and it has proven much easier and faster than creating, storing and installing a clone drive when it hits the fan.

PS - I use 937
and 826 with equally satisfactory results. 937 has better clone management features.

Good luck.[/QUOTE]bobdat

 

Actually it is just a disk drive with a USB interface - Most BIOSs do support booting from a USB drive.

 

Thanks for your informative reply bobdat!!