X1 win 7 no disks - USB backup????

[RRHODY]

The X1 came per-loaded with Win7, but no disks. Is there an easy way to clone or image the SSD?
I tried Macrium Reflect but tech support says Windows won't allow booting from USB. What other way is there to restore other than USB? I'm not interested in buying another unique M2 SSD for my generation X1.

[theterminator93]

If it's in warranty you can request the recovery USB media stick be mailed to you. I've done that a few times.

CloneZilla would be my first choice to save the SSD image to USB otherwise. You need to make a bootable USB, and use a separate USB storage medium to save the image to (it won't save the image to the boot drive).

I did both for my T25.

[dr_st]

Acronis True Image will allow you to save the image to whatever and restore it from whatever (you may need to boot its recovery environment to restore).

[RealBlackStuff]

The other day my brother-in-law needed a bigger SSD (was only 80GB, incl. a recovery partition) in his small desktop.
Got him a 240GB SSD and downloaded Macrium Reflect first, but couldn't get that working.
Then I got this free backup/cloning software: https://www.easeus.com/backup-software/
Installed it in W7.
Disconnected its DVD, hooked up the new SSD instead.
Started EaseUS Todo, found the Clone option and in just 30 minutes the whole SSD was cloned onto the bigger one!
Much faster than I'd ever seen in Acronis TrueImage!
Removed the old SSD and booted up on the new one. Perfect!
Went into diskmgmt.msc to delete the recovery partition and extend the main partition, leaving 30GB unoccupied for SSD maintenance.
That program could also have backed up onto a big enough USB.

[RRHODY]

Is Acronis or EaseUS Todo cloning different from Reflect?
Using Macrium Reflect, I cloned the X1 M2 SSD to an external hard drive but that drive was not USB bootable because of a Windows limitation, according to Macrium [see the following]:

"Important
Windows cannot boot from a USB connected drive. This is a restriction imposed by Windows. If you clone your system disk to a USB connected external drive then, to boot your clone, the physical disk must be removed from the USB caddy and attached to your Motherboard SATA port."

The external drive is not an M2 SSD required by the X1, and I don't want to buy a duplicate M2 SSD that works in my X1, so I can't attach the cloned external drive to the motherboard. The cloning process deletes the target drive, so if it was made USB bootable, wouldn't that be deleted by the cloning process?
There's got to be a work around somehow; I can't be the only one with this situation.

[dr_st]

Are you trying to clone the drive so that you have another bootable drive or image it as a backup so you can recover the current installation if it fails?

Windows will not boot from USB normally, that's true, but why would you need to do so? Just boot the recovery environment of your choice from a USB drive, connect the other USB drive with the image, and restore onto the M2 SSD.

[RRHODY]

What "recovery" are you suggesting?
You are dealing with a super novice not cognizant of computer nomenclature.

[dr_st]

Just use any tool you want (Macrium, Acronis, Clonezilla) to create an image of your drive onto any USB-connected device.

In the event of failure, use the same tool to restore your image.

[RRHODY]

I've done that but can't get it to reverse - rejected by Windows. Is there something I'm supposed to do BEFORE trying to re-load the cloned image via USB?

[dr_st]

You are not supposed to boot the cloned image. You are supposed to boot into the recovery environment of your software (every cloning/imaging software allows you to create a bootable recovery disk/flash drive), and restore from there.

[RRHODY]

And what is the the "recovery environment," to which you refer?

[dr_st]

Like I said - every software will allow you to create a bootable disk to launch its recovery environment.

Most modern software will allow you to image a drive from within live OS running from that drive. But you cannot restore onto the drive while the OS is live, since it would destroy the OS and crash your computer. You have to boot another OS. The recovery environment is such a mini-OS.

[RRHODY]

I appreciate all the help.

[Brad]

A drive Clone is a mirrored copy of the hard drive.

A backup image is one big file of your drive stored.

Since windows won't allow booting the clone from an external USB drive make a backup image stored on the external USB drive. Should you need to restore that backup to your existing SSD or another replacement SSD boot the X1 from the backup program's "recovery environment" and with your USB drive connected restore the image.

You can have as many of the backup images as your USB external drive will allow.

Depending on how important the data is having a second drive that you cloned at the ready can be very handy.

Brad

[RRHODY]

Much thanks