Booting Off a Clone

I got to wondering. I periodically clone/image (includes the OS) my main internal C drive with Drive Image (similar to Acronis and Ghost) onto an external storage drive F and even copy that onto another internal storage drive G. [Both F and G contain other unrelated files/folders besides the clones.] None of the drives are partitioned.

If the C drive crashes, I ordinarily use a Drive Image Recovery CD to load a clone from F or G back onto a replacement C drive, and thus recover quickly. Question: if I changed the BIOS setting so that it sought out the F or G drive first, could I operate my system off the F or G drive (ie, do I really need to replace C?)? Or are they too divorced from the hardware in the tower to do that?

 

Pete...very interesting. When I clone with Drive Image (I don't have Acronis), I get asked if I want a compressed file...I say "no ". But I notice that the 13 GB image file is called: C_Drive.v2i I assume, from what you've said, that .v2i files are peculiar to Drive Image (Acronis would call it C_Drive.tib), so a computer trying to boot directly from the BIOS (not from the recovery disk) would not know what a .v2i file was. And maybe it's compressed on top of that. Thanks.