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Can you create bootable hard disks in external hard drive enclossure?

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matis:
I back up by simply slaving a hard drive to my C: drive and cloning C: to that slave, using Acronis software.

Works perfectly.  Once or twice a week I back up this way; few times now this saved my @ss.  I can simply swap the drives and boot the backup.  Or I can use Windows Explorer to copy files or folders from the slave back over the corrupted files on C:.


Now I've got to set up a backup system for my ex-wife.  She's not gonna fool with connecting slave hard disks to the data and power cables.  Not her thing.


I bought a hard disk tray to simplify the slaving process.  This avoids having to deal with cables.  Just slide the tray in, power up and back up.  Problem is the computer only detects this tray intermittently.  I think the tray must be defective.  Works only 6-7 times out of 10.  Theother times the computer cannot see the slave drive.

So heres the question: Can a hard drive inside an external USB enclosure be cloned so that it's bootable?

I tried this with acronis without success.  All I could make was a huge backup file that could be restored if necessary, but all at once, not file by file.

I tried Ghost with the same result.

Do any of you actually use an external USB drive for backup and can you produce bootable images with it?

If you can, I'd appreciate the exact model number and name of the hardware and the software used.

If you use a tray and it's reliable, can you give me the make and model and what software you use?

Must be a way to do this without her fooling with cables and such.

Thanks,


matis

Edit to add:  I forgot to mention: I have extra hard drives so all I need is a USB enclosure, not a complete unit with hard drive.  Same for a tray.

Also if you can see that I'm doing something wrong with Acronis or Ghost please advise.  I'd be satisfied with a USB that doesn't boot so long as I could copy files or folders and not the whole thing, when I had to.

Thanks, again

TarpleyG:
It can be done because I have some techs out in the field using this method to tote around images.  I am not really sure how but I'll see if I can find out.  Did you google?

Greg

edit to add:

Try here:  http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx

matis:
Thanks for the url, Greg.  But the material was either general or over my head.

I should've mentioned that I wanted to create a hard drive that was bootable.  I can remove it from the enclosure and make it C: if I actually had to boot it.  Don't need to boot from USB unless I can do so without a PhD in  Computer Science.  

Thanks,


matis

Vodka7:
You should be able to boot right from USB if your motherboard supports it.  Note that a lot of motherboards will only boot USB is the USB drive is formatted in FAT, so an NTFS backup won't do you any good through USB.

As for backup software, no idea.  Can't you just clone the drive in Ghost instead of creating a boot image?  I don't really have any experience with Ghost.  The most advanced backup I've ever done was running the Maxtor or WD utility program and clicking "Copy C to D"  As a side note, it takes over 14 hours to copy an inches-away-from-death full 200gig HD over to a new one.

Standing Wolf:
I've been doing that with Macintoshes since about 1986. At the moment, I have two internal hard drives and one external. They're all three bootable. Years ago, I could simply copy the operating system from one to another. Now that we're using the new "improved" OS X, one has to install the operating system.

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