Restoring a partition in Vista

[Derekc]

I am using Windows Vista, and have a 500gb drive which has been partitioned into 157gb for Windows, and the rest as free space. I have used ATI9 to make a backup of the Windows partition in case of disaster.
If I ever need to perform a complete recovery, I would have to use the Manufacturer’s (HP) recovery discs since I do not have an actual copy of Vista. This would return the disc to one partition of 500gb.
My question is, if I then used the ATI image to restore the Windows partition, would it create the partition for me or would it place it within the ‘global’ 500gb partition. I am concerned since to took 17 hours to repartition from one to two.

[seekforever]

If you setup a replacement 500GB drive with your HP disks and it creates all one partition then there will be no space to restore the smaller-sized partition from your image. Also, just prior to restoring, TI would blow away the entire partition so in that manner it would restore the smaller partition but everything the HP recovery did would be gone so why do it in the first place.

If you have an image then is there any reason you need to use the HP recovery method? In this case, if you have an image of the smaller Windows partition and restore it to the drive it will create the partition on the drive as defined by the parameters contained in the image. This would then leave the rest of the space unallocated which you could then partition as desired with Windows Disk Management. You could also have an image of your whole disk and restore it to the new disk.

BTW, TI9 does not officially support Vista.

[MudCrab]

I agree with seekforever. If you have your computer setup how you want it now, boot from the TI CD and create an Entire Disk Image (check the Disk # checkbox). Then you can restore this "base" image later if necessary. If you have since created a "data" partition in the free space, make sure you have backed that up before you restore your base image. Once the base image is restored, you can restore your data partition image. If you restore the Entire Disk Image, you shouldn't have to worry about needing to do a Vista repair to be able to boot Vista.

Multiple users have reported success with TI 9 and Vista when using the CD. Installing TI 9 into Vista is not recommended, though some have also done that with some success.