Acronis TI home USB boot reboots

I just tried using the windows clone feature to backup my drive to an external usb drive and find that windows while loading reboots constantly. I believe this is due to the hal layer being incorrect.

My drive configuration:

Internal drives are 2 sata drives in raid 0 running windows xp
External drive is 1 usb ide drive

Answers to standard questions you may ask:

The usb hd is found in the bios as a boot device, and in windows it is not a removable device.

After cloning the internal drives to the usb drive, Windows does attempt to boot from the usb drive, when the bios is set to boot from that drive first. During the windows loading process the computer reboots. I removed the source drive from the machine to make the usb drive the only one, but it made no difference.

I did not remove the drive from the usb case and put it on the motherboard because this is not how I want to use the backup of my source. I want to boot and use the backup image from USB.

I did not run sysprep before cloning because I could not find information on the proceedure, the link pointed to in this post is no longer valid and searching acronis website for sysprep provides no results.

 

Update: Taking the drive out of the usb case and putting it on an internal motherboard connector works. This is not how I want to do my backups though. Any help would be appreciated.

I am thinking I might have to install xp on the usb drive and then copy the hal.dll and whatever ide sys driver it puts on it to the xp installed on the internal sata raid.

 

I`m having the exact same problem i am trying to restore from a backup on a external USB western Digital drive and it works fine in windows and creates the backup but as soon as i try boot from the CD and then restore from it it crashes whole PC and it reboots and never gets to loading the backup in.

 

I just tried again to install windows onto the usb drive when no other drives were in the machine. Now when installing there is a message that indicates a problem with the cmos and install can not install. I am going to try a different external usb box.

Edit: well it looks like you need some sort of driver kind of like an unrecognized SCSI device. Anyone know anything about a generic usb driver? I am really starting to doubt the claims of being able to boot off a USB device at this point.

 

I recall reading on this forum that Windows XP doesn't boot from an USB drive even if the BIOS has that option.

 

Maybe this link will help...

http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

Still working on this...but definitely Acronis is no better than ghost when it comes to this issue even though it says it works it does not.

 

There is a least one commercial organisation that sells an external hard drive/software combination which can be booted with a Windows system loaded.
The fact that TI can clone your existing installation to such a piece of kit is a bonus.
As Vista boots using a different method I wonder if it would also work in that environment.

Having just one cloned copy as backup is not a method I would choose. I prefer to have several generations of images which I can select to restore from. This I do on a frequent basis to exchangable hard drives.

Xpilot