Macrium USB boot to clone hard drive

Am using Macrium personal free version;I find it a great product. I use it to clone my laptop hard drive to a spare hard drive connected via USB in case laptop hard drive fail. Well I had a failure the other day in the laptop hard drive. It could boot but was somewhat non responsive even in safe mode. I booted with the USB macrium media (I created) and found that I could not change the source and destination hard drives like I could in the windows installed Macrium program. The only source that it gave me was the bad hard drive and would not allow me to designate the USB connected hard drive as the source and clone it. Tried to drag and drop like in pgm but no such function. I wrote macrium technical support just to see if they had an answer. Thanks for any insight. Perhaps in the future I might create disk images on an external portable hard drive since it looks like USB Macrium boot can restore from those.
Thanks, Peter

i backup using>> "Created a system image". its better then system restore or any backup application.
if your computer fail. its only take 20minute for restore image. and your computer health again

sorry for my english.

pcumming said:

Am using Macrium personal free version;I find it a great product. I use it to clone my laptop hard drive to a spare hard drive connected via USB in case laptop hard drive fail. Well I had a failure the other day in the laptop hard drive. It could boot but was somewhat non responsive even in safe mode. I booted with the USB macrium media (I created) and found that I could not change the source and destination hard drives like I could in the windows installed Macrium program. The only source that it gave me was the bad hard drive and would not allow me to designate the USB connected hard drive as the source and clone it. Tried to drag and drop like in pgm but no such function. I wrote macrium technical support just to see if they had an answer. Thanks for any insight. Perhaps in the future I might create disk images on an external portable hard drive since it looks like USB Macrium boot can restore from those.
Thanks, Peter

Hi there
in general Windows can't run from an externally connected USB drive -- so the only way is to replace the old drive with a new one --

Sometimes though if you are lucky a USB drive connected via a USB -->SATA connector will "poodlefake" Windows into thinking it's running off an internal drive and will boot and run.

Asmtmedia or Sabrent adapters tend to work

If boot fails simply use the "repair boot option" from the bootable recovery macrium media and select the usb installation as the windows boot to repair.

If this still fails then you can make a Windows to Go system if you really need to run Windows from an external USB device.

Another option - a bit more comples though is to use any Linux distro --these boot from external devices and install a Windows VM on the Linux Host.

Failing those options if the HDD is broken / defective on the internal computer replacement is the only option.

Note just taking a system image is no good for a Windows system that you want to boot and run entirely from the external device.

If the internal device is OK then Macrium restore should be able to see it without problem and restore from the image.

Cheers
jimbo

adiy said:

i backup using>> "Created a system image". its better then system restore or any backup application...
...sorry for my english.

Your English is good enough.

That is exactly what I did when the HDD was dying in one of my PCs. Made a Macrium image of the drive before it failed completely, then restored that to a replacement SSD.