Boot rescue from internal disk?

I have seen the interesting and clever procedure for creating a USB disc which can boot the Acronis rescue utility, but is it possible to boot it from an internal disk?
I'm considering a setup with 2 internal SATA drives:
Disk 1: Boots XP
Disk 2: boots Acronis rescue and holds the .tib files.
If disk 1 is replaced I can then temporarily select disk 2 as boot device in the bios in order to restore disk 1.
I have ignored 'my documents' in this for simplicity.
I'm using TI version 9.

Phil

 

Setting up an internal drive is basically the same as setting up a USB hard drive.

You should be able to follow my guide or restore one of the FAT32 images to the drive. Then copy the Acronis files from a flashdrive. The remainder of the drive can be NTFS for holding backups or whatever else you want. Remember, restoring a disk image to the drive will remove all existing partitions so make sure you have backups of any important files before you begin so you can copy them back. If this second drive is a new drive you're just setting up, then that won't be a problem. Otherwise, you can use partitioning software (like Disk Director) to make changes to the drive without needing to do a disk restore.

Since you're working with internal drives, you may want to disconnect your Windows drive while preparing the Acronis drive. That way there's not a risk of accidentally changing the Windows drive.

 

Not only is it possible, it's a great way to organise a two disk machine. Like you I have twin SATAs so, with a bit of help from here I created a small (1GB) partition on the second (data) drive and used Mudcrab's bootable USB guide to make it bootable. Because ATI rescue media couldn't see all of my drives I had already created a VistaPE bootdisk with both ATI 11 and DD10 aboard, and simply copied its contents to the new partition.

Had I only had a single OS on drive one I would have left it at that, and just used my boot options function key to choose which disk to boot, but disk one has both XP and Vista so I also installed Grub4DOS as boot manager.

The whole setup is rock solid and a pleasure to use, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to you.

 

Thanks both. A great help and much appreciated. I'll try it out with an old IDE 4GB drive from the junk box whilst ordering the new drives.

Out of interest, I've finally but reluctantly come to the conclusion that dvd is not a solution to backups and now the intention is to have a 3 drive setup. Drive A with XP; drive B with Acronis rescue, 'my documents', paging file and acronis backups of XP; drive C in a safe place.

If drive A is in a swappable bay, I can copy 'my docs' from B to a second partition on A, interchange A with drive C, update C from a .tib and then pop drive A in the safe place. It will ensure that I can restore the .tibs on a regular basis and puts geographic distance between archives and my primary data. If drive B is a big un, I can also keep old data and XP backups easily on a hanoi or GFS basis too. Additionally, it might be a bit faster than the present one disk system plus USB backups and the backups should also be faster being sata to sata.

Thanks again.
Phil

 

An update: I have created bootable flash drives but cannot get Acronis to recognise them.
I've tried two drives - a very old HP 32Mbyte formatted FAt (16) [FAT32 was not given as a format option] and a Buffalo 512MB formatted FAT32. Both boot up okay (albeit slowly) but cannot be seen by:
Acronis 9.3854 under XP
Ditto rescue CD
Ditto USB rescue
9.3677 rescue CD.
Neither the backup nor clone options, nor safe or full versions work.
What might I be doing wrong?
Phil

 

If you can't get TI to image the flashdrive, just restore one of my empty images (linked below) to the USB hard drive and then copy the files from the flash drive to the USB hard drive. The remainder of the USB hard drive can be partitioned as desired.

 

Great!! Now booting successfully from an old 'small' 4GB drive set up to test the principle. To think that 4MB used to be big!
Many thanks
Phil