GA-Z170X-UD3 Motherboard - Boot from USB possible or not?

[ElectroStingz]

I think you might be over complicating things with the not so noob friendly terms and description. Yes you are correct in what you are saying but if someone has an idea which is possible but are not using the correct terms you got to see past that and relate to them at their level.

The idea stems from being able to create a "copy" of a windows installation for restoration purposes in the event of failure to an external USB drive. I believe this is the question at heart which I have explained as best possible in a very friendly manner.

I'm not saying you did, but Paul has renewed hope that he will be able to "clone" his boot drive to his external disk and recover from it in the event his boot drive fails.

See this bit,

Hi, in reply to ElectroStingz's post,

As i have an external USB hard drive, are you saying I could create a copy of my windows SSD drive onto that? My copy of windows on that SSD is 70GB & will easily fit onto the external USB hard drive.

Yes, by using the backup feature it creates a disk image file.
This will simply be 1 file 70GB (less than that) which you can store anywhere on any medium, unlike a disk clone.

He can copy it in the form of a disk image, the hope is there? 

[paulgood]

Hi guys, many thanks for all your effort & great length you're going to in order to advise me. I appreciate the simplest way of cloning/ or what ever word is used to copy my working version of windows 7 from my c:\ (SSD) onto an external USB hard drive.

I know that some processes will wipe clean everything on a device, but my external hard drive has a load of data on, that I don't wish to lose.

It seems we have afew experts on here with conflicting opinions.

Here's my senario which will occur in the future;

A malware/ virus messes up my SSD with windows on - my C:\

I need to restore my existing copy of windows 7 that is clean at present from a USB external hard drive.

Setting aside the terms used to do this, I would need to boot from that USB hard drive & restore my messed up SSD with windows 7 on, back to the current working order that is "clean". I have a clean copy of windows currently, so all we need to do is figure out a simple way to copy/clone this onto the USB hard drive.

Over to you my techie's, let the banter begin. But seriously thanks for all your persistent help & ongoing support for what should be a simple job.

Regards Paul

[ElectroStingz]

Well you cannot boot from the USB drive so I recommend the Acronis Boot CD option.

Creating the disk image

• Use an Acronis CD/DVD, boot from that. (Get a CD drive or USB CD drive)
• Create the Disk image of your SSD and save it to your external USB drive.
• Store in a safe place.

Failure occurs.

• Use an Acronis CD/DVD, boot from that.
• Restore the Disk image which you saved to the external USB drive.
• Done.

[dmdilks]

A malware/ virus messes up my SSD with windows on - my C:\

I don't worry able this stuff just use Malware-Bytes & windows defender. I have been doing this for 30 yrs. In the pass 5 years that is all I have used. I repair peoples computers using Malware-bytes.

I had a computer that had the RTM Vista and the RTM windows 7 on it. I would have still been using it but gave it to one of my kids. I don't about the small stuff. Just keep everything up to date and you will not have malware/ virus messes ups.