I think what you are talking about here is an external usb hard drive. Let me
know if i'm wrong here. If it is it should automatically be detected by
windows as a hard drive which it can boot from. To address the case of an
image backup and to have the shortest downtime i would prefer to use the xp's
internal mirroring capability.

yogi

"Sen" wrote:

I am thinking of getting either Ghost or Acronis True Image backup software
to image my C: drive to reduce down time if my hard disk crashes. I have been
told that I need to re-install my external backup drive as an internal
primary drive to get my computer to recover. In such an emergency, can't I
restart the system from just the external backup drive for the shortest down
time? Appreciate your advice.