Restore to secondary drive..

[stewbaby]

Can TI do the following

I have an XP system with a C and D drive (different physical drives, 40GB and 120GB). Drive D is new, and is not partitioned. However, I plan to start putting some data on it since I'm running out of space on C.

I'm confident that I can create an image of C using TI and store it an D. Now, suppose C crashes and is dead. Can I restore the image of C onto D, and start using D as a master drive? And if so, will I lose all existing data on D? I was reading the manual and it appears that it restoring the drive to another disk will erase all other partitions. Although D itself is not partitioned, does this imply that restoring to D will essentially wipe out all existing data.

In other words, is there a way to have two drives, and if one crashes, can you restore the crashed drive image and combine both drives onto the single remaining drive, without loss of data?

Thanks.

[MerlinAZ]

I had the same problem as you.
I had a 60 GB drive that was almost full.
I had a 120 GB drive I was using as a backup drive.
I cloned my 60 over to the 120 and replaced my smaller drive with the larger and made it my C: drive and bought an external drive to backup to.
Granted, this added some cost (the external drive) but I figured my sanity/time/data was worth it.

Restoring an image to a drive will go over the top of anything already there and erase it.

[seekforever]

Originally Posted by stewbaby

Can TI do the following

I have an XP system with a C and D drive (different physical drives, 40GB and 120GB). Drive D is new, and is not partitioned. However, I plan to start putting some data on it since I'm running out of space on C.

I'm confident that I can create an image of C using TI and store it an D. Now, suppose C crashes and is dead. Can I restore the image of C onto D, and start using D as a master drive? And if so, will I lose all existing data on D? I was reading the manual and it appears that it restoring the drive to another disk will erase all other partitions. Although D itself is not partitioned, does this imply that restoring to D will essentially wipe out all existing data.

In other words, is there a way to have two drives, and if one crashes, can you restore the crashed drive image and combine both drives onto the single remaining drive, without loss of data?

Thanks.

An easy way that still protects your data is to partition D into a partition for your OS if needed later and store data and your images on a second partition on D.

If your original drive fails then you can restore your image from the second partition to the one set aside for your new C. Does cause perhaps a lot of your disk to be set aside "just in case".

This may be a case where having a partition setup for only the OS and apps (not any data) is beneficial because such a partition will not usually be overly large.

MerlinAZ's recommendation is a good one or you can just buy another internal drive and have it available for testing and if disaster strikes. New drives aren't that expensive but if your budget is tight it still is an expense.

[bVolk]

An interesting case, stewbaby.

I think that besides the additional spare partition on the 120 GB drive (the one that seekforever has been talking about), to be kept there as the future location for the system, it would be advisable to create a very small second partion on the 40 GB drive as well and then proceed to create further images from such 40 GB layout. That way the imaged Windows installation would be "aware" of a second partition on the original drive and would not make trouble after being restored to the two-partition layout found on the 120 GB.