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Creating a Bootable USB Drive with ATI Home

Acronis True Image Home 2012 has just been released. Acronis has added New Windows 7 Integration to enable seamless integration into the Windows control panel.  Friendlier user interfaces makes it easier than ever to backup and restore your data. The new Extended Capacity Manager to allow you to take advantage of more than 2 Terabytes of external storage that some versions of Windows may not allow.  Also new is the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager that allows you to restore an unbootable PC with the touch of the F11 key instead of booting from flash drives or a CD. 

This review of True Image Home was performed on an older version of the backup software. The looks of True Image have changed a bit but the concept of creating a bootable USB Drive has not changed much so this can still be used as a base for creating the USB Drive. See our full review of the Acronis 2012 Home version.

It is always a good idea to make a bootable rescue media when using Acronis True Image Home.  If you computer become so unstable that it is unbootable, you can use the rescue media to restore a previously created image to get your computer up and running quickly and easily. We have reviewed how to create a bootable CD in previous versions of True Image and that process has not changed.  In this review of Acronis True Image, a bootable USB drive will be created.

Acronis has always made it easy to create a rescue media and the creation of a bootable USB drive using True Image is no exception.  From the Tools and Utilities menu, simply select Create Bootable Rescue Media as the following screenshot demonstrates.

Then you are welcomed to the Acronis Media Builder.  The Wizard will help you create a bootable media with the components that you select.

The following screen shows the bootable components available to place on the bootable media.  Once the media is created, you will be able to boot into the media and run the selected components.  I chose to insert the Acronis True Image Home program and the Acronis Bootable Agent.  The bootable agent is recommended because it includes drivers for USB, PC Card and SCSI hard drives.  You would also be able to connect from the computer remotely using the Acronis Management Console.

The next relevant screen gives the option to select a drive to be used to create the bootable media.  I chose the removable disk which is the USB Drive.

The next screen shows the details of the operations that Acronis True Image Home will be performing.  It looked good to me so naturally I smacked the Proceed button to create the bootable USB drive.

When it was done, it told me so.

Now let’s see if it works.  Depending on your computer manufacturer, you may need to press a key or invoke a set of keys to make your computer boot to the USB Drive.  You may even have to go into the BIOS to change settings to boot from a USB drive.  Consult your computer manufacturer for instructions on hoe to do that. 

For instance, this review of Acronis True Image was compiled using a Dell OptiPlex.  I had to press the F12 key at initial boot up to invoke the following screen where I could select the USB drive to boot.

Once the boot device was selected, the computer booted to the Acronis True Image Home program in low-level mode.  Once the program was started, all of the features seen in this review of True image were available. 

The Acronis Bootable media, whether you choose to make a bootable CD or USB drive is an important step to protect your Operating System and important data from being lost forever.  Hard Drives crash, Windows crashes and there are many unforeseen events that could happen to make your computer unusable.  The Bootable Rescue Media could very well be a lifesaver when it comes to retrieving data.

Once again, Acronis has made it very easy to protect your data with this new release of True Image.  This is a recommended utility to have in your arsenal of data backup and recovery utilities.