First thing: I am not asking what software I'm supposed to use. I already know the answer: Ghost (proprietary), Clonezilla, and dd (if I'm careful).
What I really want to know is if it is possible to (essentially) bit-for-bit clone my entire installation (OS, installed software, activation(s), etc.) to an external USB hard-drive, and then boot off of that (if I need to, I know how to edit BIOS settings and use Plop boot manager), and work with it day-to-day as if there was virtually no difference from using my internal HDD now.
Again, I'm not asking how to install Windows to an external (because I know I'd need to do some special workaround), I'm asking if I can clone everything and boot off of it.
In case you're wondering why I'm going to this trouble: I'm using a Lenovo Essentials laptop that has an unmodifiable partition table (due to recovery crap), and has all 4 of its partitions spoken for (3 primary, one extended, cannot change the extended). Anyway, my thought is that if I can clone everything and boot off of it when I need to, and just have a Linux distro on the internal HDD, then that could work.
45 Answers
If you force windows to recognise the USB hard drive as a non-removable hard drive, then there shouldn't be any issues. How you would do that I'm not too sure as I haven't done this before, but this page may be of help -
Theoretically, you would set the registry key, clone the hard drive, and then hopefully the registry key that you set would let windows boot off the now non-removable hard drive (even though it's actually a USB hard drive)
Yes you can, I use drive clone 9. Then after clone is done change your boot option in bios to boot to the cloned usb HDD ,just to check if the clone was created correctly.
1Yes, you can. Specifically, this is known disk imaging, and is used all the time in the enterprise world for managing fleets of laptops or systems used by employees. It works for OS X, Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris, and should work for any other OS.
Special preparations have to be made if you plan to move some OSes to a different system, but if you're just going to clone the internal drive and boot the same system off of the clone, you'll be fine!
3Personally you can but I would start fresh for best results if something were to go wrong at any given time. I have done it before from fresh anyway as post and booting to OS was easy and hassle free if you set the bios to start from external devices, and plus your bios has to support it. So if you choose to do any other good luck because there is always a chance to lose a *.dll file that halts your best efforts.
My answer is no. However, I'm new at this. My evidence is that I just tried it and could not get Windows 7 to boot from the external USB Hard Drive. I had previously cloned an internal SATA drive (using Clonezilla) and that worked fine. Doing the exact same process, I cloned the external HD. After changing BIOS to boot from it, it would start windows, hang up, then go into Windows repair. Going through startup repair did not help, since the external drive's Windows OS wasn't being recognized.
In my case, I was just testing the ability to clone to an external HD because I plan to use it to make other machines. So, hopefully that will still work. Unfortunately, I don't have another machine with me right now to test, but I will later this week.
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