# Making a Seagate !TB External Portable HD bootable



## maxwell4jfhgd6 (Oct 23, 2009)

I am running a Dell Inspiron Laptop with Windows XP Pro SP3, Intel® Core 2 Duo Processor T7500 (2.20GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB), 3GB Dual Channel 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM, NVIDIA® GeForceTM Go 8600M GT with 256MB DDR2 dedicated graphic memory. 15.4 UltraSharp Wide Screen SXGA+(1680x1050) display with TrueLife and a 320GB configured 7200RPM SATA hard drive.

I have just purchased a Seagate !TB External Portable HD that is USB run and my questions are:

Can I make this USB drive bootable so that I can backup my main system to it using the Recovery Module to restore the image if needed?

If the drive can be made bootable how is this achieved?

The Seagate people told me to get DiscWizard and although this software will do backups to the USB drive the Recovery Media Builder included will not build the required module to the USB drive - only recognizing my C drive and CD\DVD which I find rather odd as it states it will build to a flash drive etc. In fact, this item does not even recognize the large USB drive even though the main backup utility and Windows OS do.

I am not a techie person - in fact compared to most in this forum I know very little indeed - but I do not understand how, if I create the Recovery Module on a CD or DVD, booting off the CD or DVD will enable me to be able to access the Seagate !TB External Portable HD that has the backup files on it.

Thanks in advance for any assistance provided.


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

NOT Bootable via USB.
However .. You can backup your *Operating System* to the external using Acronis True Image

I haven't tried this yet .. But in the New Version of Acronis ...
You can boot from the System Backup Image in the External .. to test it out.
I assume this would only be good for testing since the USB will slow it down.

To use an external to make Acronis Backup Images .. make sure the external is formatted NTFS...
Fat formatting does not like large files.


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## maxwell4jfhgd6 (Oct 23, 2009)

Thank you very much for your help - it is appreciated. My external drive is NTFS and what I find interesting is that Paragon created a bootable Recovery Module on a small ( 2Gb) FAT32 USB memory stick but will not even 'see' the large 1TB external drive when I try to do likewise on it but it does allow backups to be created on the large eternal drive. I am curious as to why the software will create a bootable Recovery Module on one USB item and not the other. The ony difference is overall size and the format type - NTSF as opposed to FAT32. The 1TB external was formatted to FAT32 at one stage ( took just over 12 hours ) but the sotware would still not create a bootable Recovery Module on it so I reformatted the 1TB external back to NTSF.


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## Noyb (May 25, 2005)

I'm not familiar with Paragon.
Acronis True Image or Macrium can make a Boot CD that will run the Backup/Recovery 
routine if the System is not bootable or even if a new HD has been installed.

Acronis is Very popular here at TSG... The trial DL is fully functional for 15 days
Macrium also is Popular.

I've never had a problem with the Acronis Boot CD .. Once Acronis is loaded into Ram and Running ...
Not being able to see my USB External HDs and find my backup images.

More about Imaging


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## maxwell4jfhgd6 (Oct 23, 2009)

Paragon works along the same lines as Acronis and you can create a bootable Recovery CD/DVD that runs the Backup/Recovery routine etc. This is all well and good but I am unable to work out how this Recovery CD/DVD will recognise the external drive so that recovery can take place even if the external drive is set as the first item to load in the Bios.

I assume that the list in the Bio would be as follows:

1. USB external - 2. CD/DVD - 3. HD. This order suggests to me that on booting the laptop will look for boot files on the USB drive first and when not finding them will then boot from the CD/DVD. I could be wrong of course for when is human logic ever used with computers 

Thanks again or your assistance and for the imaging link that I will certainly check out.


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## Alex Ethridge (Apr 10, 2000)

I have Paragon Hard Disk Manager; but, I use it only as a partitioning tool.

I use Acronis True Image for imaging a drive. You can use Acronis True Image to create a bootable CD or DVD in an external USB drive; but, it isn't guaranteed your system will boot from that same external drive. I always boot from the computer's internal CD/DVD drive. Any USB storage devices that were connected during the boot process are then accessible.

Here is a guide on doing what you want it with Acronis True Image; but, I can find nothing on Paragon Hard Disk Manager:

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=176958

and here:

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/supportfiles/acronis_bootable_usb_hd.pdf


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