CA ARCserve BMR-LuLZiSO

CA ARCserve is a nice volume-level backup solution that backs up a running Windows system, has infinite incremental capability, and a pretty powerfull Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) to the same or disimilar hardware available.

By default the BMR is available in 2 ways:
BMR type 1) either with the ARCserve D2D CD itself - the trial download includes the .iso file - this CD boots and presents the BMR dialog directly, or
BMR type 2) booting a standard Windows Installation CD/DVD together with the ARCserve D2D "boot kit" - that's a USB memory stick with the CA MBR wizard. This boot kit is created from an installed D2D -> tray icon -> Advanced -> Create Boot Kit.

You see both types need a CD or DVD drive to boot.

So what can be done on machines that don't have a CD drive, or in situations where booting from a CD is not desired?

In this HOWTO we learn how to prepare a USB bootable device, so that no CD boot is required for ARCserve D2D's BMR process. So we add a 3rd type of BMR booting to D2D's toolbox:

1.Take some backups
Well, installing ARCserve D2D, setting up a backup destination and then running some backups should be straight forward. These backups could be used for BMR with the bootable CD, but that's not what we want today ...

2.Use USB memory stick or a USB hard disk
For the bootable data you'll need at least the space to put the files from the ARCserve D2D BMR CD ~353 MB. I have only tested this on NTFS formated disks / USB sticks.

Note: this could be the same USB hard disk that you plan to use as a backup destination - in that case it stores both the D2D data of your machine, as well as the boot files for BMR.

3.Copy the BMR CD data to it
I recommend using the VirtualCloneDrive (Elby, free as in beer) to see the content of the .iso file. Copy all files from there to the root of your USB device (disk or flash memory). A simple copy and paste is all you need. Winzip can also extract files from the .iso to the USB volume.