Bertil Lindstrom said:
Hi!
I have a friend with an laptop. He wants to backup the systemdrive
(XP-sp2) to an external (USB2) drive that is bigger than the laptop
disk.
Can Norton Ghost make the external diskimage bootable sothat the
laptop can be booted on the bigger (external USB) drive?
Regards
/Bertil
Bertil:
We'll assume from your description that what your friend wants to do is to
"clone" the contents of his laptop's HD to a USB external HD so that, for
all practical purposes the cloned HD will be a duplicate of his/her laptop's
HD. He can do that using the Ghost program or other disk imaging program, in
effect directly cloning the contents of one HD to another HD.
But...
The cloned USB EHD will *not* be bootable as a USB device (but see P.S.
below). If, however, the cloned HD can be removed from its USB enclosure it
could be installed in the laptop as a replacement for the laptop's HD,
assuming the latter HD had failed and needed replacement. We're assuming in
all this that the HD in its USB enclosure is a 2 1/2" HD designed for
laptops/notebooks and that it can be removed from its enclosure.
On the other hand, if the laptop's HD was non-defective, but not functional
because of system files corruption or other events, the contents of the
cloned USB EHD could be cloned back to the laptop's drive for restoration
purposes.
The size (capacity) of the USB EHD is of no consequence as long as it's
large enough to receive the contents of the source (laptop) HD.
Anna
P.S.
There have been reports from various parties that a USB EHD containing the
cloned contents of the XP operating system can be made bootable. We've never
been able to achieve that even though some insist it can be done.
