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lej2050

24 Posts

1951

November 17th, 2009 16:00

Boot from a usb drive that has a clone of my C drive

I have Dell Dimension 2400 with XP. I would like to boot from my backup drive. It is a usb external HD Cloned from my C drive. Can that be done? My bios has a boot choice of booting from a usb flash drive but not from a usb external drive.

TheRealFireblad

4.6K Posts

November 18th, 2009 07:00

Afaik - no... it's (surprisingly) still not possible to boot from an external hard drive?

 

Having said that... this 2006 article states:

 

 

Yes, it is possible to use the external hard drive as a total replacement / backup unit if your internal C drive crashed and you were no longer able to boot into Windows. This is called making a mirror image of your hard drive.

You can do this if:

a) your external hard drive is as big or bigger than your internal hard drive, and

b) you use a disk imager like Acronis True Image to make a "mirror copy" or "disk copy" from the internal hard drive (C drive) to the external USB drive (D drive, for example). A mirror copy essentially copies the *entire* drive from one to the next.

 

Yet this article - dated December 2008, suggests:

 

 

Unfortunately, the stark reality is that external hard disk drives are not proffered as bootable devices by the disk manufacturers.

 

 

I side with the latter of the two, but I dearly want the first one to be right!

 

I take it you haven't tried to boot from the external/cloned drive yet?  Nothing ventured... :emotion-55:

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