Question : Cannot boot from USB Drive after cloning using Ghost 12

I am unable to boot from a USB Drive which I have copied to using Norton Ghost 12.
I am using Windows XP Home edition.

Details are as follows:
Started Ghost 12.
Selected 'Copy My Hard Drive'.
Selected source drive 'C'
Selected destination drive 'L' which is the 3rd primary partition of my USB Disk.
Ticked the following options on the next page:
  .. Set drive active (for booting OS)
  .. Copy MBR

The copy worked fine - no problems.
Then went into Computer management / disk management and ensured that drive 'L' was set as 'Active'.

Checked all hidden files on the root drive of 'L' and they appear as per drive 'C'.
Checked the boot.ini of drive 'L' and it looks OK, details are as follows:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

I then attempted to reboot the PC with the USB on and the following appears:

Attempting boot from USB Device.
Missing Operating System.

This should surely be a very simple task as what use is a backup if you can't rely on it to boot up to restore in the event of a failure.

What am I doing wrong?

Your assistance would be much appreciated.

Brian

Answer : Cannot boot from USB Drive after cloning using Ghost 12

That's how it is. You can't ghost an internal HD to a USB drive and expect it to boot XP properly. You would have to install XP to the USB Drive using the instructions in the following links and only then you will might be able to boot XP successfully from USB. XP wasn't built to boot from USB.

http://gocoding.com/page.php?al=petousb
http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=177102101&pgno=1
http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-6346-5928902.html
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6160062.html