Making external hard drive bootable with an additional partition

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Guest

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Hi Guys,

Take note on this:
I have two internal hard drives C: (SSD) and D: (HDD)

I'm wondering if I'm able to use the windows backup and restore system to backup my boot drive, which is my SSD onto an external hard drive which has two partitions in it so that the backup will be bootable.

Can I backup my SSD using the backup and restore system that windows provides and still have my files from my HDD in the other partition or will they conflict with each other? Will the SSD be bootable?

Thanks!
 
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boosted1g

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Jun 12, 2013
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Better option:

Windows backup uses a horrific amount of bootspace and resources.

Use Macrium Reflect free.
You can have better control over scheduling, full/incremental/differential backups and you wont have to deal with making it bootable.
With marcium you can add the recovery console to your boot menu.

The other thing I would suggest doing is going into disk management and setting the external drive to be a letter that is latter n the backup, this way the drive will always be assigned that letter. This way it is reliable to schedule backups to.
 
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G

Guest

Guest


So Macrium is a program that I can clone my disks onto my external hard drive? Will it be bootable though? Like if windows were to fail on me or if I was updating Windows and something went wrong, I'd want to be able to go back to my previous backup easily.
 
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boosted1g

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Jun 12, 2013
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Yes it is bootable.

From macrium you can have it add itself to the boot menu and thus you can open the recovery console and access the external.

Now I am not sure if it can do it if the windows OS drive completely took a crap (not that windows backup could either).

But what you can do is burn the recovery console to a CD as well incase the OS drive is completely dead.



Since you can create the CD with Macrium in case of complete hard drive failure,it is a better-in-every-way option then windows backup (outside of the fact that it requires an additional software download and is "more complicated" because it gives the users more then 1 option).
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Mar 16, 2013
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Macrium lets you make a bootable DVD or USB. You use this to boot into to recover an image you made on the external, to a new internal that you've replaced the broken one with.
Or just to redo the OS due to some corruption or Update fail.

Another option, Casper (not free) actually does create a full, bootable, system image on the external drive, I've not tried it, but supposedly it works.

Remember, though....your backup is only as current as the last time you made it, and the last time you tested it.
 
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boosted1g

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Jun 12, 2013
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Since the newest version Macrium Free does allow you to put an entry into the boot menu for the recovery console, thus not needing the DVD or USB as long as the OS drive is not completely dead (winodws can be completely trash, just need the actual hard drive to work appropriately).

Otherwise you can us the DVD/USB disc option.

Macrium and Capser are both good programs, both of them are leaps and bounds more refined then windows backup.
 
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G

Guest

Guest
I have another confliction though. I forgot that I actually have three partitions in my external hard drive. My external hard drive is 2TB and I have 500 GB for my mac so I can back it up and the other two partitions are for my PC (one for SSD and one for HDD). I installed Macrium and it doesn't detect the seperate partitions that I made for my windows backup. So I see 500 GB for my mac and 1.33 TB for windows except the 1.33 TB is supposed to be split into two partitions. One that's supposed to be bootable and one that's just storage backup.
Also is it bad to have ALL of my backups on one external hard drive? One for mac and two for windows?

I'm really sorry for forgetting to say this piece of information from the beginning and the confusion. :\
 
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boosted1g

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Jun 12, 2013
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Its not bad to have all of your backups on one drive, that is the way most people do it.

I would check in disk management to see if your windows backup is actually in its own separate partition or not.

I would just delete the windows backup since you are switching to macrium anyways.
 
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G

Guest

Guest


Okay. I checked to see and it actually is partitioned correctly. Also I actually am not using windows backup. Lately, I've just been dragging and dropping files into my external hard drive. And of course I correspond the two drives into the two partitions so that the files won't get mixed up. But recently, I got nervous about driver failure so I wanted to see if there was a program that could make it so that the SSD portion could be bootable.
 
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