Home AOMEI Products Support

Can I boot from a disk image on and USB external hard drive?

Can I make a disk image on a USB external hard drive?  If my internal drive fails, can I boot from the external drive?  Will all my programs be there and functional?




Tagged:

Comments

  • No, you need to make bootable media in the utilities menu. With that you can restore the disk that was backupped on the external disk to the new or formatted internal disk.
  • thank you
  • I' would really need a confirm, because I thought that to replace a system in a new hard drive I'd need a "clone", rather than a disk backup. Can I really use a "disk backup" to restore my system on a new HD?
  • edited June 2018
    Yes, I've restored a system backup multiple times to a new SSD on multiple computers for myself and for friends. I prefer to do it that way to eliminate all possibilities of using a wrong drive or overwriting the original by mistake. You make a backup to a second HD on the same PC, a system share or an external HD. Shutdown, disconnect everything but where the backup is stored and replace your system drive with the new HD (SSD). Boot up using the AOMEI boot disk or USB you should have created and run a system (or disk) restore to your new drive. Shutdown and start up and it should boot right into the new drive. Just make sure the new drive is blank and formatted the same as the old drive, either MBR or GPT. (Using a new drive out of the box should make this check unnecessary. This is if you use a spare drive to test the process... which you should do at least once to make sure your image is good, the boot disk works and the restore will boot).

    In fact, doing it this way will prove to you that you can replace your system drive in case of failure or corruption, etc which is why you are doing a backup in the first place. Good luck and try it with a spare drive. If you need directions for cleaning a drive or checking if it's MBR or GPT, post again. The process is easy in diskpart.
  • That's great. Thank you so much
  • to make the try you suggested, could I use a new sata, with a usb adaptor and cable? Will it be seen/recognized by AOMEI?
    Thank you again
  • As the drive you'd restore to, you want to remove your old C drive and put the new drive in it's place so you can boot from it. As this thread indicates, you can't boot from an external USB drive and that's what your PC would see if you do that. As the backup destination, I would think so but it would be easy to test. Plug it in, run AOMEI and "browse" for backup location and see if it's there as an option. I use an external Seagate 1TB USB drive that plugs into one of my PC's rear USB ports and it works fine as a backup destination. If Windows disk management can see the drive then AOMEI should also, but again, try it.
Sign In or Register to comment.