The Mother Board

was wondering if it is possible to create a windows backup system restore disk not on a cd, but on a thumbdrive, and to have the vhd file and all other windows backup files on that same thunbdrive. this would take care of a problem that would come in the future where laptops no longer come with dvd burner built into it, and there is a hdd failure where a new hdd has to be imaged from a windows backup. this is on windows 7 operating system, as we have not moved to later OS's for particular reasons.
TIA for your ideas.

b.

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www.bootdisk.com/ will have appropriate boot files tor almost any media so you can boot from it.
Maybe minimal 20 GB thumb or flash drive would be needed.
Better would be an SSD external drive that can hold all the files. "Refresh" to that at least once weekly.

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F@H.. to solve mankind's maladies.. in our lifetimes!

this program makes a lot of things with flash drives, including what U want to do:

http://www.rmprepusb.com/

_________________
"I have only come here seeking knowledge,
Things they would not teach me of in college"
-Wrapped Around Your Fingers-
-The Police-

I need to boot into the windows recovery method... like if you made a recovery disc, but instead of being a disk it's a usb thumbdrive.
like this thing...
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... epair-disc
can I just take the contents of sunch a cd and copy it to a flash drive that is bootable? I'm sort of guessing "no". maybe someone has a trick up their sleeve?

_________________
my main rig...
asrock 970 extreme3
AMD FX-6300 Vishera CPU
zalman cpns5x performa hs/fan
crucial ballistix 2x4gb sport ddr3-1333
powercolor ax7750 1GBK3-H vga
antec neo he 650r
Samsung 840 EVo SSD 120 GB
toshiba 2TB HDD 64M cache sata3
seagate 1TB HDD 64M cache sata3
hitachi 2TB HDD 64M cache sata3
lg wh14ns40 bd burner
optiarc ad-7240s sata dvdrw (nec chipset)

take a look at:

http://ccm.net/faq/29462-windows-7-crea ... ir-usb-key

perhaps is what U r looking for

_________________
"I have only come here seeking knowledge,
Things they would not teach me of in college"
-Wrapped Around Your Fingers-
-The Police-

dude, you ARE AWESOME!

I think so, yess.
thanks. the only thing I see that this may not do is be able to hold the needed imaging files on the same thumbdrive (due to fat32 restriction), as they can be quite large (30-50 gigs)...
but it's a great start.

_________________
my main rig...
asrock 970 extreme3
AMD FX-6300 Vishera CPU
zalman cpns5x performa hs/fan
crucial ballistix 2x4gb sport ddr3-1333
powercolor ax7750 1GBK3-H vga
antec neo he 650r
Samsung 840 EVo SSD 120 GB
toshiba 2TB HDD 64M cache sata3
seagate 1TB HDD 64M cache sata3
hitachi 2TB HDD 64M cache sata3
lg wh14ns40 bd burner
optiarc ad-7240s sata dvdrw (nec chipset)

Many thanks, it´s my pleassure

I think it fix better with what U need:

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/create-wind ... storation/

_________________
"I have only come here seeking knowledge,
Things they would not teach me of in college"
-Wrapped Around Your Fingers-
-The Police-

you were onto something with the previous link. I can create the necessary bootable thumbdrive to do the recovery independent of having an HDD with the OS installed fine.
I can even make the initial partition fairly small on the thumbdrive so as to have a larger space as a second partition formatted ntfs where the image will be located... EXCEPT windows doesn't easily allow one to make a thumbdrive (or any "removable" drive) multi-partition. so here is the quandary now.
I see a Lexar utility... http://www.wikihow.com/Partition-a-Thumb-Drive but it isn't working with my current thumbdrive (a sandisk)... anyhow, I'd like a way to "flip the bit" by command line or something not so sneaky, and easier.

upshot : need to multi-partition a thumbdrive, so I can have the boot partition be fat32, and the rest be ntfs.

one more thing with how my procedure works, the boot drive (c:) that I am making the backup of, it will be on a drive that has the backup located on a different partition on the same drive... then I had planned to copy those backup files to the thumbdrive. so no making of backup straight to thumbdrive... the thumbdrive backup is only needed if the boot drive goes completely down.

_________________
my main rig...
asrock 970 extreme3
AMD FX-6300 Vishera CPU
zalman cpns5x performa hs/fan
crucial ballistix 2x4gb sport ddr3-1333
powercolor ax7750 1GBK3-H vga
antec neo he 650r
Samsung 840 EVo SSD 120 GB
toshiba 2TB HDD 64M cache sata3
seagate 1TB HDD 64M cache sata3
hitachi 2TB HDD 64M cache sata3
lg wh14ns40 bd burner
optiarc ad-7240s sata dvdrw (nec chipset)

I was thinking that what U were looking for is a way to simply boot the backup dirve and automaticly restore your configuration and data, thi is the way must of backup disks work

the problem in making multiple partitions in an usb drive is thet windows doesn´t expect the "removable drives" having more than a partition and only sees the first one, on anyway U will find some more information here:

http://www.rmprepusb.com/tutorials/multipartufd

_________________
"I have only come here seeking knowledge,
Things they would not teach me of in college"
-Wrapped Around Your Fingers-
-The Police-

some more information

http://www.prime-expert.com/articles/a0 ... evices.php

_________________
"I have only come here seeking knowledge,
Things they would not teach me of in college"
-Wrapped Around Your Fingers-
-The Police-