TI 8 Disk Clone to USB drive.

Can someone please advise if what I want to do is possible?

I have a 120gb USB drive that I use for backups of my 120gb internal EIDE drive. Both are identical WD drives but the USB drive is installed in an ULTRA case and sits on my desktop.

Both have 3 identically-sized partitions (C:, F:, G: and H:, I:, and J: ), the last of which (G: and J: ) are used only for backups.

What I want to do is to be able to clone the first two partitions (Boot/system and Applications) of the EIDE drive to the first two partitions of the USB drive. My rational here is that if my EIDE drive fails (hardware failure), I can remove the USB drive from it's case and install it in my system (since my BIOS does not seem to support booting from the USB drive) and be right back in business without having to restore anything.

The problem I have is that TI 8 Disk Clone would seem to allow me to do this while preserving the data on my source drive but as soon as it clones the boot (C: ) partition, it wants to boot from the cloned (H: ) partition before continuing. Since my system won't boot from the USB drive...

Any advice or guidance would be appreciated.

 

I believe this is an unsupported feature (or an assumed feature) - the best way to handle this is to put the 120 into your system then follow the same proceedure and then remove the drive and put into the USB cage. There may be a better way to handle the task you are looking to perform - it may take more time to restore but it will work better for you, - Remove the existing partitions on the USB drive that are not needed and leave the partition that you are using for backup. Now if you should have a failure of your primary drive you may put the USB 120 directly into the system and boot to a recovery CD (Acronis boot CD). Now when you restore the system all you need to do is restore the partitions that will fit on the remaining free space (primarily your boot partition). This way you at least have a workable system - and if you should need to get at some of your data that is not restored all you have to do is mount the image and retrieve what you need. This will allow you to get opperational after a failure, until you get repair parts to put you back into production.
D

 

Well, I figured out how to do it myself!

Since I do my regular backups to the USB drive, all I had to do was RESTORE the backup image of my main drive (partitions C: and F to the equivalent partions (H: and I of the USB drive.

TI lets you select the target partition for the restore but unlike CLONE, there are no reboots required. It even lets me mark the backup boot partition (H as Active since one Active partition is permitted for each physical drive.

Now my USB drive is an exact copy of my main drive and could be installed as my main IDE drive if a catastrophe occured. This would not likely be my 1st course of action on a crash but it's comforting to know that if all else fails, I can just pop in my other drive and be back to where I was!