Multiple drive images on the same disk/partition?

[Rykks]

Hi!

Ok, here's what I'm trying to do and what I've seen - though I didn't get a chance to try more than thrice...

What I'm wanting to do (or have been "tasked" by the boss man) is to store multiple Full Backups of various hard drive images in a single place on a dedicated physical drive on a computer that will be used to image these drives onto either blank drives or drives with different images already on them that will be installed into the PC on open SATA or IDE ports. I've had great success restoring and cloning Windows, Linux, and even solid state drives.

These will be an assortment of different Windows (98, 2000, XP Pro) images and Linux based drive images. The intent is to create a library of archived drive images that can be accessed and the selected drive image or development version can be burned onto a new drive and the engineer can go off and merrily start dorking with/changing stuff to suit whatever new requirement we have.

Ok, so I tried this: I made a Full Backup of a WinXP hard drive and saved it to the C: drive (same drive as Acro lives on for now - will be a separate one later) with a unique name. None of that "Security Zone" stuff... just said, "save it here and call it this". I then made another Full Backup of a different drive's image (a different Windows version...maybe it was Linux, don't remember as other tasks have interfered) and saved it with it's own, unique name to the same unpartitioned drive.

Now, here's what happened when I, subsequently, tried to burn one of the two Full Backup archive images onto a new drive: (btw - I'm doing the "Restore" bit with the "Rescue CD" to image new drives as this seems to work really well) -- When I browse and direct ATI-11 as to which of the two different backup archives to use, the program totally bags it. Empty screen, nothing happens, have to hard reboot.

It works fine if there is only ONE backup/archive Acronis image on the drive but when I put a second one there, bad stuff happens. I tried putting the image files into their own folders rather than just on the root but no-go.
Anothe question is: Can I move ATI backup image files or does that hose them up if they are moved from where ATI originally wrote them?

Any idea how to fix this? Do you have to use the Secure Zone thing? Hopefully, the answer isn't to have different partitions for each saved image as that would entail possibly 15-20 partitions...

Thanks!
Rick

[seekforever]

I can't tell you what is going wrong but you can put image files from different machines on the same drive, same folder. They are just data files although they tend to be larger than most files. You can move them to different folders, partitions, drives, etc.

Make sure you are using a unique filename. If you called one Mybackup and the next one, Mybackup1 it possibly might confuse TI since this is how it keeps track of incrementals. I don't really think this should be a problem!

I am assuming you have lots of space on the receiving HD. You might run chkdsk /r on it just to ensure it is in good shape.

You do not want to use the Secure Zone since it does not allow you to copy images out of it with normal Windows operations.

Are you using the latest build of TI11?

[Acronis Support]

Hello all,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image

Rykks, you can copy the archive to any location, in any case the program should recognize it.

I may recommend you to use our Live Chat service here in order to receive immediate support. Please ask the operator to provide you with an ISO file to create another Acronis Booting Rescue Media.

Thank you.

__

Oleg Lee