[SOLVED] Booting off a cloned disk

[riaz_fir]

Hi i want to use a third party backup software to clone an entire ssd disk which is the one i boot off and has windows on it.

The purpose is to back up the system.

In future i might boot off it or restore the drive from the USB to the SSD.

Would this work?

If i have working windows and just to test the cloned usb disk, if i boot off the USB into windows and i right to think that it would not cause any issues?

I just want to boot off it once to see the cloned disk function works

 

[Barty1884]

Yes, you can have a duplicate of a drive that is bootable - ensure you clone the entire disk, including boot partitions etc.

It's recommended NOT to have both bootable drives connected at a given time, as you might inadvertently boot to the incorrect/older drive, making troubleshooting a nightmare.

 

[riaz_fir]

ok i cloned the ssd to usb, took ages at 6mb/s on a usb2.0 drive.

i tried to boot off it and got inaccessible bot device BSOD, why is this?

I checked the usb and it is indeed a clone, but im assuming it hasnt created the boot info correctly? should it not be an exact copy?

I noticed in BIOS after setting usb as first boot device that i saw an extra setting labelled "Sandisk" it had several options (Auto,Floppy,Hard Drive and CD) it was set to Auto.

 

[Barty1884]

Sorry, I may have misunderstood - I didn't appreciate you were talking about cloning to a USB.

There are additional steps required to have Windows install (and be bootable) from a USB flash drive - which would remove the ability to 'clone' as you'd need to start with a clean install.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-run-a-portable-version-of-windows-from-a-usb-dri-1565509124

 

[riaz_fir]

That look promising thanks

I was using this https://www.backup-utility.com/help/disk-clone.html
but i think that it only works with internal or possible external actual ssd or hd drives

 

[USAFRet]

Making a full clone to an external is sort of a waste of the whole drive.
Without special configs, you can't "boot" from it.

And you're sucking up a whole drive for a single clone snapshot.
You can use any of the current cloning or imaging tools to make a daily/weekly/monthly/whatever series of backup images, and then use one of those to recover to a new drive in case of need.

My system does a nightly Full or Incremental image, and I can store 2 weeks worth of images in less space than a single full clone.
My C drive is a 500GB 850 EVO, currently 214GB consumed space.
A full clone of that would consume another 500GB drive.
A series of nightly Full or Incremental images from Jan 13 to Jan 30 takes ~444GB. And I can recover the whole C drive from any day in the last two weeks.

Read more here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-3383768/backup-situation-home.html