(PS the USB drive is already set as active) In short I have a win7 installation on a USB drive, (single partition) with all the drivers for my laptop, and I want to make it bootable, so I can work on the internal drive whilst it is unmounted - how do I do that step by step? In XP this was easy - I edited boot.ini to tell it it was now on partition zero and I thought this was the job BCD easy was supposed to be able to do for win7 (or replace MBR with one that will work for that setup). The copy restored to the USB drive wont boot, and I think it's because it's set up to be the second partition on the drive but is actually the first on the clean USB drive. Dell have a hidden partition first, (which you cant back up or copy!!!!!) followed by drive C: The big issue is that this is a Dell, so the original system (boot) partition was not the first on the disk. I can then restore from the backup USB to the internal HD, driven by the USB I booted from. I can't restore to the disk I am running from, so need to boot from a separate USB drive containing the OS for the laptop (M/B drivers etc) and Drive snapshot, my backup software. I have a Dell Inspiron M101Z and have just had the hard drive replaced, so need to restore my System (or spend days re-installing everything!!)

How do I make a copy of my HD bootable on a USB drive (60GB HDD)?

Drive snapshot bootable usb