Bootable Backup Drive

moldboy

Jul 5 2005, 05:15 PM

Okay this is more a theory question then anything. Let's say I have a portable USB HDD, that I want to make bootable, and once I make it bootable (Assuming my BIOS supports this feature) I'd like to make a backup of my HDD.

If I were to remove the HDD from the drive enclosure and install Windows to it then place it back in the enclosure and using a linux boot cd copy everthing from my HDD to the Portable HDD would this Portable Drive then be able to boot as an exact replica of my current system. Or better yet is there a free (I stress free) utility that will make a clone of my HDD to a portable HDD that will inturn be bootable in the event that my system were to crash?

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BuffaloHELP

Jul 5 2005, 05:45 PM

QUOTE(moldboy @ Jul 5 2005, 01:15 PM)

If I were to remove the HDD from the drive enclosure and install Windows to it then place it back in the enclosure and using a linux boot cd copy everthing from my HDD to the Portable HDD would this Portable Drive then be able to boot as an exact replica of my current system.

You probably do not need that complicated solution. I have found these sites for you on instructions to how to make your USB external drive to boot. Again, as you said, only if your BIOS supports USB boot.

Gateway
HP

QUOTE

Or better yet is there a free (I stress free) utility that will make a clone of my HDD to a portable HDD that will inturn be bootable in the event that my system were to crash?

I am still looking for your second request option. However, I am more inclined towards RAID system. If a Mac user can create USB floppy drives to act as a RAID system, I'm sure USB hard drives can behave exactly the same. It's only a matter of finding the right driver to support this theory.

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moldboy

Jul 5 2005, 06:19 PM

Okthanks for that. Now as I mentioned before if I boot to linux (CD) and run a copy command from Local C: to portable would that then make the bootable HDD the same as the Local HDD, seeing how linux should copy indescrimitaly things like the regestry page files ect.

also, do you think I would still be able to use this as a portable drive, just with a copy of my HDD on it, (I could still put other things on it)

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tuddy

Jul 7 2005, 04:17 AM

QUOTE(moldboy @ Jul 6 2005, 05:19 AM)

also, do you think I would still be able to use this as a portable drive, just with a copy of my HDD on it, (I could still put other things on it)

Shouldn't be any reason as to why not. Its a drive like others, you can take a HDD with Windows/Linux on it and stick it into another computer and still write files to it as a normal drive.

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(G)noping

Oct 6 2009, 04:54 PM

The external usb drive can be made as a bootable usb disk. I mounted a usb hard drive and installed an Ubuntu Linux on it. This Linux is different from the "bootable" live usb pen drive: it is a full (persistent) installation, and hardware dependent.

I use it to backup my Windows computer. There are two ways to do this:

The simple way is "dd if=/dev/sda of=/path/to/file". This requires the Linux disk to be bigger than the Windows computer.

The second way is to tar and zip the Windows files. While the second method saves a lot of disk space, it is not able to restore the system alone in case Windows does not boot. One has to install a minimum Windows and then restore all the files from the backup.

-reply by noping

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