How to back up my OS and boot-up from my new "My Book" Ext. USB Drive?

Hi all, my first post here…I think…

Just purchased a new WD “My Book” 1.5 TB external USB drive for my Windows PC, running Windows XP. I attempted to back up my entire boot drive (C-drive) so that I could boot from the WD “My Book” drive, but it appears that all is copied were work files and not the OS.

How to I back up my OS and does the WD “My Book” have the capability of booting up the computer?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I don’t believe the MY Book is bootable. If you are using Smartware it only backs up select file types. Even if you got the drive to boot with XP on it it would probably be extremely slow.

Joe

I am very sorry to hear this. Are you certain, Joe?

What if I copied my entire C drive to  “My Book” and if the internal C drive OS develops a problem, then I just copy the C-drive OS files to the hard drive and boot up. Would that work?

Thanks.

The best thing would be to Image your C drive with software that makes a bootable rescuse CD. Macrium, Paragen and Easuse all have free versions. They don’t have all of the features of their paid versions. I use Acronis True Image 2010 paid. I have my HD partition with system on one and data on the other. I’ve restored the system in less than 15 min. I hear Macrium Reflect http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx  recommenced frequently  Windows 7 also has backup capability but I see mixed results with people using it. Hope that helps

Joe

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Thanks, Joe.

I purchased Acronis 2012 recently and when I installed it, the computer went nuts. After days of trying to recover the machine,  I wound up formatting the drive and reinstalling XP. Then I remembered that I had saved a separate hard drive with the OS on it. It wasn’t recent, but it was usable and I installed the drive and booted up. Had to reinstall a lot of stuff, but at least it’s better than starting from scratch. 

I have some questions in to Western Digital at this point about the “My Book” capabilities. We’ll see what they say. I may go out and purchase an internal SATA drive to use as a back-up OS, which is why I purchased the “My Book”. The salesperson told me that I could boot from it. Looks like he was incorrect.

I’ve made a couple of rescue disks, but they don’t provide the entire OS and programs which have been loaded on the machine. That’s what I’m looking for. Total backup SECURITY!

Wonder why we apparently cannot boot from an external USB drive? Maybe because the USB drivers aren’t loaded yet at the point of boot-up. Yet, the USB drive is shown in the BIOS as a boot-up option. Strange.

Actually, the problem is the firmware in the newer My Book and My Passport drives interferes with the booting process.  It depends on whether your BIOS can ignore the interference.  I regularly boot a WinPE environment from both My Book and My Passport drives and just as a test I booted Win 98.

And if you have USB 3, the transfer rates can exceed that of your internal drive.

Having said that, Win XP has a known problem in that on initial load, it resets all the USB devices and thus terminates the boot.  So that applies to any USB drive.

What I do is to put a backup image of my system disk on the external drive.  Then when I need to restore it, I boot from the external which has the recovery software running under Win PE.  I don’t use Acronis, but I’m sure that would work as well.

Again, this will depend on whether your computer’s BIOS will let you boot from the drive.  So far I’ve had three laptops from two manufacturers and they have are able to boot from the externals.

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