Clone to bootable USB hard drive - any pitfalls

I am looking to clone my laptop drive to an USB hard drive. I have TI 11. Does anyone know of pitfalls or tips needed to make the USB drive useable in the event that my internal C drive suffers a complete failure. The main purpose in all this is for when I am out of town on business. I am hoping that a cloned USB drive will at least allow me to boot up and continue working until I finish a business trip. I have already made a full backup image of my C drive, but in the event of hard drive failure that won't be of much help. I keep another USB drive backed up nightly with key data. So in theory I would have my OS and programs on one drive and all my data on the 2nd drive. I am hoping this would take care of my crash recovery concerns ...

cheers, todd.

 

I'm pretty sure it will work but why not try it first.

 

Unless your laptop is a very new type, I don't think Windows will boot from a USB drive. Or is the plan to remove the usb drive (if it is a laptop type) and install in the laptop in case of original drive failure?

 

The USB drive is not a laptop drive in a shell. It is a standard small USB drive (2.5 inch). So I was not planning to take the clone and install the drive in the laptop. The laptop is quite recent (HP nx9420) I would think it is recent enough to change the BIOS to boot from the drive.

The 2nd question I have is will the cloning do anything to my C drive such that the computer would no long boot from it, but expect to boot from the external USB drive?

 

Bunna wrote:
> I am looking to clone my laptop drive to an USB hard drive…. I am hoping that a cloned USB drive will at least allow me to boot up and continue working…

Below is a copy/paste excerpt of what I received from Acronis via their Chat Line. Note that it pertains to a C Drive IMAGE, thus of no use if the laptop drive crashed (no drive available to restore onto), but I’m hoping this method would also apply if the USB drive has a clone of the laptop drive instead of an image.

Acronis wrote:
> Yes. it is better to store your image on the external drive. In case of failure you will be able to boot your PC with Boobable CD (that you can create using our software) and restore your image form you external drive.

I sure would like to hear if this works!

 

That pertains ONLY to an Image not a Clone - no matter where it is kept. But Image is better though as you can store more than one (at various points in time) on another drive as long as there is enough space. With a Clone, you can only have one per drive.

And yes the Bootable True Image CD will restore an Image correctly, in fact I do all my Backup, Recovery, and Clone functions from the bootable CD.

 

DwnNdrty, Thanks! Back to Bunna's original question, if his laptop drive crashes while traveling (no replacement drive available) is there any way that somehow the USB drive would allow him to keep working?

PS- I would appreciate your comments on a new thread I just started, regarding True Image Echo Workstation.

 

People ask this all the time and you'd think it would be easy to do by now, but MS has made it very difficult to boot Windows from USB hard drives. I've read that it is possible (with some serious tweaking), but even if you got it to work, it probably wouldn't work from your PC which is where you'd have to make the changes. Meaning that the USB hard drive bootable version may not work when on the internal drive and the version on your internal drive won't work on the USB drive.

If the laptop allows drive swapping or has a second drive bay, you might want to purchase another drive and use that for the backup. It would be internal and bootable.

Otherwise, if it's that important, carry a spare internal drive and a TI CD and just replace the drive and restore if it fails.

 

MudCrab,

Well understood... thank you!