bootable USB disk

[markie_mac]

Hi all,

 

firstly - apologies if this has been raised before - I'm a new member here;

 

I have a laptop running XP with large USB external hard disk.

If my main C: drive goes down, to avoid loosing lots of work time, I want to have a copy of my system on my external disk, so I can continue working and fix the problem in parallel to that.

 

Now, initially I tried using the XP backup utility, backing up my entire system and restoring on the external hard disk.

Restarting the system having selected this disk to boot from - the system just hangs.

 

OK, so perhaps the system backup copy isn't really a complete copy of the system...

 

I figured I need maybe to start with XP installed on the external disk.

So, I began to install XP on this disk. But it seems XP wants to install itself on my C drive by default...

 

Having just reinstalled XP on my C drive a week previously, and had to reinstall all my apps and reconfigure etc., I didn't want to risk this new install screwing up my now-perfect C: drive, so I abandoned the attempted install of XP on the external disk.

 

So - how do I do this job and get a nice bootable copy of my main C: drive on an external disk???

 

Thanks

mark

[maynardvdm]

Hi. I have done some searching on this and to do this is very difficult(apparently). check this : http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176 or http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10215

 

hope this helps.

[danzil]

Hi

what software where you using, other then nt backup....

you wll need a decent cloning programming like casper xp......

once cloned you will need to boot from the usb hard drive....this i will be a setting in your bios..

then all should boot fine.....have you checked that the usb drive is all ok,,,1 small bad cluster can cause several issues...

casper xp http://www.fssdev.com/products/casperxp/

redards

danzil