USB bus functional during bootup?

[Lee Shipman]

If I enable the on-board USB support on my motherboard (SOYO K7-V Dragon
Plus) and attach a properly-formatted USB drive to a port, can this drive be
accessed if I start the computer with a boot floppy? I'd like to clone the
primary partition of my IDE hard drive to the USB drive so that in the event
of a crash or file corruption, I could restore that partition and be back on
line without the hassle of a fresh WinXP install, download of the
patches/fixes, restoring all the customization, and finally restoring the
files. The software I'm thinking of using (Acronis True Image) will
accomplish the cloning, but I need the capability of restoring outside of
the WinXP operating system.

If this scheme isn't satisfactory, I can just install another IDE drive
within the computer but I'd like to avoid that if possible.

My assumption is that since the motherboard supports a USB keyboard (which I
assume must be functional during bootup), the USB bus is functional during
this time. Does that make sense?

Thanks...Lee

 

[Guest]

read your board spec's from the soyo site it should tell
you if you can boot from it. Check thie program out if you
want a bootable clone , not a image.

A copy is a copy. A Image is a image. A
clone/copy/backup is bootable, it has everything your
original drive has,OS, Programs, Email, Address Book,
Data and Registry. You can update it at anytime, any part
of it. Casper XP does that from the windows platform. I
have had Image files for years, the problem with them is
it's a whole file. You cannot make changes to them, you
cannot access them, you have to restore them. Some will
boot some won't. A image file cannot be written to a
smalled disk unless you can change the partition size to
fit the smaller drive. Lets say you have a 40gb main HDD
with 10 gb of data, you cannot put a image of it on a 20gb
disk. If you're up-grading to a larger drive wouldn't it
be nice to have the old drive for a back-up




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Want to test drive a Demo for 30 days. It has some
features disabled.

http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3000-2248-10161152.html?
tag=lst-1-8

 

[Lee Shipman]

Thanks. The Soyo manual is "less than clear" about this, so I asked the
techs at Soyo. They confirmed that the bus is operational on bootup. We'll
see if this is so, as I'm planning to mush on with this project.

Lee

 

[Alex Nichol]

If I enable the on-board USB support on my motherboard (SOYO K7-V Dragon
Plus) and attach a properly-formatted USB drive to a port, can this drive be
accessed if I start the computer with a boot floppy? I'd like to clone the
primary partition of my IDE hard drive to the USB drive so that in the event
of a crash or file corruption,

With appropriate software. I suggest you get BootIT NG, from
http://www.BootitNG.com ($35 shareware - 30 day full functional trial)
- or possibly its little sister, Image for DOS, but that is not going to
be as widely useful. BING will back up a hard disk partition as a
compressed image to another hard disk (including a USB one) or to a CD
or DVD set, and restore them needing no more than a boot of its own
floppy (cancelling Install if you do not want the primary function as a
boot manager). And all other partition management too