On Apr 29, 6:18*pm, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:
In message
,Carl writes:

[]

You are right; I used the wrong terminology.

One of the big surprises and disappointments of my introduction to
Microsoft Windows was to learn that, after making a clone of your HD,
if you have trouble, such as I am now having, that you could NOT copy
back the clone of your HD to your internal HD.

Yes, you can.
[]

What I should have said was I was told, that for licensing reasons, M/
S will not allow you to boot your machine from Windows on an external
USB hard drive.

As another has said, it's technical rather than licencing reasons (and
there are people who've hacked it so that it can be done).



I have a Seagate external HD.

I used Seagate's free software to clone my Netbook's HD to an external
USB HD.

Very wise. (Not wise not to be sure how to restore it, though.)

If I connect that USB HD, boot up, change the Boot Device Priority to
list that USB HD first, then exit and save the configuration, I get
nothing but a blinking white cursor on a black screen.

The first time this happened, I asked on this forum, I believe, and
was told that what I was doing was not possible because M/S did not
allow you to boot from an external HD.

I just tried it, and I am looking at the blinking cursor.

Was I misinformed?

[]
You can clone your HD (to all sorts of things - USB, DVD, external HD).
You can copy the clone back to your HD, for example after a corruption,
and it will restore a system that works as it did when you made the
clone.

You cannot boot from whatever it is you cloned to - only the original
(or a replacement) HD after you've done the cloning-back.

Whatever software you used to make the clone should have offered to make
some boot media that would be able to do the cloning-back. (I suppose it
is still valid to claim it's a cloning utility if it doesn't do this,
but it's not a lot of use without it.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf
**http://www.soft255.demon.co.uk/G6JPG-PC/JPGminPC.htmfor ludicrously
outdated thoughts on PCs. **

A language is a dialect that has an army and a navy. -Max Weinreich, linguist
and author (1894-1969)

Thanks for that explanation, J.P.

This weekend, I will make another clone using the Seagate software
and watch carefully to see if there is any offer to make some sort of
boot media that will enable the clone to be copied back to the
internal HD.

Perhaps I missed it on my first clone; I am very new to Windows.

Carl.