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Can I do a system backup for a drive I didn't boot from?

edited October 2016 in AOMEI Products Support

I have two physical drives in my PC.  One of them has the Windows 10 anniversary edition installed, and the other has an older version of Windows 10 installed. It is NOT a conventional dual-boot system; it is two independent systems on two different physical drives.  I can boot from either one; I just select the one I want, using my BIOS, when I start or restart my PC.  Both drives are GPT (UEFI).


I would like to be able to back up both system partitions without rebooting.  Backupper works well for me to back up the active system, automatically selecting the Microsoft backup and EFI partitions along with the C: drive.  But if I booted with Drive 1 and I want to back up the system on Drive 2, it won't let me.


If I choose system backup, it automatically selects the system partitions on Drive 1, and it won't let me change it.  If I choose partition backup, it lets me select the boot partition on Drive 2, but it doesn't recognize that I'm backing up a system partition, so it won't let me select the Microsoft recovery and EFI partitions that should be included in the backup.  If I manually back up and restore all three partitions, the PC still won't boot from Drive 2, and the install disk can't repair it.


If I boot from Drive 2, I have the reverse problem --- the system backup for Drive 2 works automatically, but I can't make a useable backup of the system on Drive 1.


Is there any way to back up both systems without rebooting?  Thank you.


Comments

  • edited October 2016

    Can't you make a disk backup of #2. that should include all partitions and boot info.


    Other method is to use the 3 partition backups, which don't boot by itself, and add a boot entry for OS#2 in OS#1 with EasyBCD. That always worked for me with Windows 7. But that was BIOS not UEFI.

  • Thanks for the response. I don't want to make a disk backup of #2, because it's 3 TB, and the other partitions are full of data.  My system partition is only 60GB, and only 25 GB of that is used (I use almost all portable programs, which I store in data partitions), so a system backup only takes 2 minutes, and the image is only about 15GB. 


    I'll look into EasyBCD, but it may be just as easy to reboot.  I was really hoping backupper could do it; I thought an earlier version could, but I may be wrong, and it probably wasn't UEFI anyway.

  • @tony  You have the two systems in two drives, right?

    Now you can backup the system od drive 1, but not the drive 2?

    Please try to pull out the drive 1 and then do the system backup for the drive 2 again.

    Hope it is useful for you.

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