"RnR" wrote:
> RnR wrote:
>
>> Does anyone know if you can clone, using Acronis True Image,
>> more than one system to the same external drive and then upon
>> reboot have a choice of which to boot from, on the external
>> drive? If so, briefly how does it work? thanks.
>
> Just to add to my post, I guess drivers might interfere with above
> (on the wrong files to the wrong system) but suppose (assuming
> its possible) you clone more than one system to the same ext. drive.
> Then depending on which system you hook up the ext. drive to
> and assuming you want to boot from the external drive, does the
> external drive know from which files to boot up from or do you
> get some menu to pick from?
If you're asking if a multi-boot system, involving multiple
partitions, can be cloned en toto to an external hard drive,
and then booted from the external hard drive. The answer is yes -
if you clone the entire hard drive and if the external hard drive is
connected as if it were an internal hard drive. Forgetting methods
of kludging around with running ribbon IDE cables or SATA
cables out from the motherboard to an externally housed hard
drive, the only practical way to do that is with an eSATA external
hard drive (not a USB or Firewire hard drive). If the MBR is
proprietary, you'll also have to copy the MBR as well. You can
get away with cloning just the partitions which contain the OSes
(if all the data resides in each OS's local partition), but that may
require adjustment of the boot.ini file because of the new partition
numbering. With Vista, because of its way of referencing partitions
directly by their sector offset from the 1st sector of the disk, you
may be confronted with major BCD adjustments if you don't copy
the entire hard drive.
The eSATA electrical specification is almost exactly that of
SATA, except for the cable and the wider window of tolerance
for signal levels. The cable is shielded and it is allowed to be up
to 2 meters in length (as opposed to the 1 meter allowed by
SATA), and transmit signal level is higher and the receive signal
level is higher and lower to accommodate a wider range of
signals which may be received due to the wider range of cable
lengths. As far as the firmware in the controller is concerned,
though, the connection is SATA. There are a few motherboards
being made, now, with an eSATA connector (Dell has a couple
desktops with an eSATA connector), but most desktops still
require a back panel adapter to transition between eSATA and
SATA. These adapters can be merely physical connectors, or
they may incorporate electronics to accommodate the wider range
of signal levels. Comapanies such as SIIG also make PCI and
PCIe cards that have eSATA chipsets in them that provide eSATA
connectors to the external world.
Here is an external enclosure made by Kingwin that is aluminum
and has its own power brick to power the hard drive and a cooling
fan (a cooling fan is unusual in an external enclosure, but it seems to
be important for long hard drive life):
http://kingwin.com/product_pages/jt35eubk.asp
(Google with the model no. for prices. I bought one of these
for less than $25.)
Here are sources of eSATA controller cards (both PCI and PCIe)
http://siig.com/ViewProductList.aspx?catid=311
http://www.promise.com/product/produ...product_id=168
Here is a source of adapters:
http://www.firewire-1394.com/externa...-solutions.htm
Here are sources of eSATA cables:
http://www.firewire-1394.com/sata-cables-shielded.htm
http://www.svc.com/esata-cable.html
While it may seem that an eSATA Expresscard may enable
booting a laptop from external hard drives, it turns out that
Expresscards don't enable that.
*TimDaniels*
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