Bart PE Boot from External drive

I apologise if this has been asked before. Probably has, but I did some searches and couldn't find anything specific. So:
- Can one use the Bart PE plugin to boot from an external drive into the Bart PE environment? The idea being to use the Acronis TI files that are on that ext drive for restoration (I have a RAID setup using 3 partitions as 'local drives', so in the event of a complete failure, this would seem to be the only way to do a complete system restore of all the 'drives')?
- If it is possible, then what exactly does one to do to get into the Bart PE environment? I thought I had seen some instructions somewhere about using F11, but all I can now find under instructions at either Acronis's or Bart's website are instructions for burning/booting from a CD. I have a Plextor drive and they are notorious for not being bootable from. They are awesome for burning/reading, but useless for booting.
- What is the difference between this and the regular TI bootable rescue disk, in terms of doing restores?
- I see some people also talking about a additional 'Mustang' plug-in. What's that all about, and should one have that in addition to the Bart PE?

 

I boot from my Plextor fine.
The bartpe disk with the TI plugin will be Windows native. The usb drivers may work better/faster than the linux-based TI boot disk when restoring from an external usb drive.
As far as booting from an external usb drive, I guess it's possible, but I don't know why you'd want to. You would need to check your BIOS to see if it's possible.

 

Hey Merlin. Tks for the info.
The guys at CompUSA who built this machine were unable to use this Plextor DVD/CD/RW/etc. drive during the initial loading of the OS's (literally had to plug in another drive to boot the OS for the first time, and then plug the Plextor back in), and they just noted that Plextor drives can be finicky about booting from; hence the query about booting from the external drive.

Still though, even if I can get the Plextor to boot from, What is the difference between BartPE and the regular Acronis boot disk, and what about the Mustang plug-in?

 

A BartPE disk with either Acronis' or Mustang's True Image plug-in will have Windows native drivers and may be faster to restore from an external USB drive compared with Acronis' boot disk which is a linux-based disk.