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gateway ta6 laptop

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Shades:
From your previous posts I understood that your laptop is an old one, so it is not a given that is able to boot from USB. Even if it is able to, the BIOS in your laptop could be configured in such a way that only a subset of USB devices (keyboard, mouse, pen drive) is allowed to boot from. Computer manufacturers do this to make their computers boot faster. Most modern computers allow you to change this behavior, but not all of them.

Is your laptop able to boot from a portable hard disk on any USB port? That would be my first question if you insist on booting from a portable hard disk. Even if you manage to boot from an external hard disk...it makes use of the USB port, which is in each and every case much, much slower than the internal SATA port which the internal hard disk uses.

In other words, if you think your laptop is slow with the internal hard disk, with USB based external devices it will become like the slow nephew of a snail. Or, if you need a visual: USB would be a the size of a drinking straw, SATA would be the size of a garden hose, PCI Express would have the size of the sewage pipe that connects your house to the main sewage system. Imagine data to be water and guess which will be faster moving water in the shortest amount of time.

External devices are ideal for simply creating a backup rather quickly...but using it as a boot device? Only for (re-)installing the operating system, nothing more.

A backup in my book is a copy of a file that is not stored on the computer it normally resides. Nothing more, nothing less.

What you can do still is turn the laptop completely off, removing its hard disk, open the enclosure of the external hard disk, remove the hard disk from the enclosure and connect it to the laptop, close the laptop. If the clone action went well, the laptop should boot normally.

tomos:
I wanted a backup copy of my laptop HD OS.
-holt (March 05, 2016, 07:46 AM)
--- End quote ---

it's getting late here, but I think one of these would be the most practical:

# image backup of OS + boot CD (or USB) via same software, for restoring to your current OS drive (or a replacement of same)

# as you are trying to do in quoted post: copy onto a drive with which you can replace the current OS drive (as Shades says, you would have to remove current drive and replace with copy)

holt:
External devices are ideal for simply creating a backup rather quickly...but using it as a boot device? Only for (re-)installing the operating system, nothing more.
-Shades (March 05, 2016, 03:32 PM)
--- End quote ---
Thank you, Shades and Tomos. Yes, the above quote is exactly what I am aiming for.

I read that SSD HDs give no warning when they brick, and as mentioned, my laptop SSD is already quite old. I appreciate your water hose analogy, and offer another; a spare tire. If my SSD dies, I was hoping to be able to just boot from the external SATA USB, go online to get me a replacement SSD, re-copy the SATA USB clone onto the new internal SSD, and continue to reserve the external SATA as a backup spare copy of the OS.

The BIOS does offer the Boot options to boot from external USB hard drive, thumb drive, or disk. But so far, although I copied the OS to the external SATA USB HD, it just won't boot from it. So if my internal SSD ever dies, how am I supposed to save my OS which is loaded with the accumulated sum total of untold hours and days of hard work?

I did see where Seagate offers a sort of 'kit' consisting of a new SSD plus the necessary peripherals to clone your OS from your old internal SSD somehow, but forget the details, and don't have the money to get it (for now anyways). I also got burned by Seagate a while back with a whiny new HD which I returned to them, and they returned to me, and which eventually died prematurely just outside of warranty after a whiny abbreviated lifespan; so I'm not prejudiced, but they did burn me once.

holt:
I wanted a backup copy of my laptop HD OS.
-holt (March 05, 2016, 07:46 AM)
--- End quote ---
it's getting late here, but I think one of these would be the most practical:
# image backup of OS + boot CD (or USB) via same software, for restoring to your current OS drive (or a replacement of same)
# as you are trying to do in quoted post: copy onto a drive with which you can replace the current OS drive (as Shades says, you would have to remove current drive and replace with copy)
-tomos (March 05, 2016, 04:09 PM)
--- End quote ---
Hmm; #1 option above; boot from a CD, and somehow copy the backup OS from the external SATA USB to a new internal SSD. The big question to me is, if an OS clone won't boot from an external SATA USB, how do I know if it will boot from the cloned backup OS after I re-copy it onto a new internal SSD? I would feel a lot more confident if it would at least give me a bootable OS on the external SATA USB drive, which is only intended to act as a 'spare tire' if or when my current internal 8 or 10 year old hand-me-down laptop's SSD ever dies.

tomos:
^ AFAIK the only way to really check it is (again, as Shades says) to actually replace the current internal SSD with your copy - boot and see if it works.

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