changing parition size and my trueimage backup

[urgatorbait]

quick question:

i recently bought trueimage 10 and created a backup image of my c drive which contains my OS and all my apps. i have 2 physical hard drives and each one is partitioned into a couple partitions. if i use disk director suite to change the size of my various partitions inclusing my c: partition, when it comes time to restore my c: drive backup will it still work just fine (assuming i don't resize it to a smaller size than the size necessary to hold all that is contained in the image)? any advice is helpful. thanks.

[K0LO]

Yes. Just don't restore Track 0 and the MBR. Restore each partition one at a time onto your newly repartitioned disk layout and you should be fine.

[urgatorbait]

Thanks for the quick response. So just to be clear....

I have 5 partitions on 2 physical disks; c, d, e, f, g

c: currently has my O/S on it and I have an full image of it residing on my f: partition.

I use the Disk Director to resize my partitions as I now wish them to be. Once done, I simply use TrueImage to restore the image of my c: drive back to the newly sized c: partition from my image that is on my f: partition.

So there should be nothing problematic on doing this?

Also, I am not sure about what you said about not restoring track 0 and the MBR (master boot record?). If I simply tell TrueImage to restore my previously made image of my c: drive, will this be restored too? Or do I not really have to worry about this in my specific situation?

Thanks again for your help K0lo :D

Also, I should note that I am not planning on restoring the c: drive image because i am resizing my partitions, I have other reasons for doing that, I just want to make sure that I don't render my c: image useless by resizing the partition from whence it came. LOL

[K0LO]

That sounds correct. If you made an image of your C partition and then later you restore the image to your C partition, that should work even if the C partition is a different size (as long as the image will fit in the new size). You may find this easier to do when running the stand-alone (bootable rescue disk) version of ATI, since you will be restoring the partition that Windows resides in. ATI runs in a Linux environment when running the rescue disk version, so if you have not yet tried running ATI this way you should try it once before restoring your backup image. The reason for this is that even if you start the restore from Windows, eventually the program has to reboot into the rescue environment before restoring the partition that Windows resides in and you want to be sure that the rescue environment can see all of your hardware correctly.

ATI Versions 9 or later saves the first 64 sectors of the hard disk (Track 0) when you create an image. This area of the disk contains the Master Boot Record and the Partition Table in case your disk gets completely hosed and you need to restore these. When you do the restore, ATI will ask you to check off the partitions that you want to restore. Track 0 will be one of the choices. Just don't select it. The reason is that when you repartition your disk you will be changing the partition table to correspond to the number and sizes of partitions that you choose. The backup of Track 0 will contain your old disk layout, so you would not want to restore it.

If you really want to be sure (and better safe than sorry), do an experiment. If you have a spare hard disk laying around or can borrow one, try the operations first on the spare drive. But first disconnect your main hard disk and substitute the spare in its place. If this experiment proves successful, disconnect the spare drive and reconnect the main drive and do the restore.

[urgatorbait]

Thank you so much for taking the time to clear that up for me, it's greatly appreciated.

[Menorcaman]

Hi k0lo,

-{ Quote: "ATI Versions 9 or later saves the first 64 sectors of the hard disk (Track 0) when you create an image." }-TI has always been able to save the Track 0/MBR data into an image. The only difference is that, prior to TI 9.0 Home Build 3567, it was only saved/restored if you selected the whole disk rather than individual partitions.

-{ Quote: "This area of the disk contains the Master Boot Record and the Partition Table in case your disk gets completely hosed and you need to restore these. When you do the restore, ATI will ask you to check off the partitions that you want to restore. Track 0 will be one of the choices. Just don't select it. The reason is that when you repartition your disk you will be changing the partition table to correspond to the number and sizes of partitions that you choose. The backup of Track 0 will contain your old disk layout, so you would not want to restore it." }-Worth reading this previous thread titled <Reflections on Build 3567 and MBR> (http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=130170) because it's not quite as straightforward as we first imagined.

Regards

[K0LO]

Menorcaman:

I've read some of your posts in the other (TI) forum. It's nice to see you here also. Thanks for the clarification. That's what I intended to say but I didn't say it precisely enough.

The thread you referenced is an interesting read. Let me take a stab at condensing it into the simplest possible summary.

If you restore Track 0/MBR, then all 64 sectors of track 0 are restored except for the partition table.
If you restore the entire disk, then Track 0 is restored including the partition table.

Does this sound right to you?

[Menorcaman]

Hi Mark,

Appologies for not getting back to you sooner.

The way I read the Acronis Support statement

-{ Quote: "Please also note that, as I have already mentioned above, under no circumstances Acronis True Image restores the "old" partition table. It would be too dangerous and cause troubles to those people who restore individual partitions to the already partitioned drives. Instead of restoring the "old" partition table, Acronis True Image creates new one in accordance with the current partition layout." }-

is that the original Partition Table is never restored, irrespective of whether you restore the entire disk or individual partition(s). Instead, TI finishes off a restore by creating a new Partition Table that reflects the number of partition actually contained on the destination disk.

The important thing to note is that, when restoring a system partition from a multi-partitioned drive image to a different hard drive, the destination drive needs to be pre-configured to contain the same number of partitions (their size isn't important) as the original source drive. If this isn't done then Windows will likely throw a wobbly due to "old" partition info contained in some of its system files.

Regards