Acronis True Image and backup

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I have Acronis 7 I also have besides my desktop Win 98SE a notebook from
Gateway( no problem on my desktop, as I have 2ard drives but the computer I am inquiring about is the notebook, since it only has 1 40gb hard drive ( Gateway notebook) I can't back it up anywhere other then a external hard drive I bought for that purpose.
I have used it and have backed up my hard drive, but got to thinking, if I lost my C drive on the Notebook, how would I restore all that I backed up, when the computer starts up with an "A" drive (and c drive doesn't work) and the A drive 3 1/2 are too small to use as a backup
Remember this is hypothetical. I like to know what to do before it happens
Being a pretty old senior, it's a habit I grew to like doing

Can you help
PS I forgot to mention I bought an external Western Digital 60g hard drive to back it up on,maybe you ca figure out how I restore it if I have to

 

Does your BIOS support booting from a CD? If yes, create a bootable TI "Rescue CD". Then use it to boot your system to TI and restore from the image you created on the external drive.

 

Hello Mickyw,

Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

You've got two options to restore the image from your external drive. First, as johnpd suggested, you may create Acronis Bootable CD and boot from it in emergency case. Second, you may create floppy diskettes to boot from them (providing you have floppy drive in the notebook). Both bootable media can be created choosing "Create Bootable Rescue Media" tool.

Also you may create Acronis Secure Zone and activate Acronis Startup Recovery Manager in it. This will allow you to boot Acronis True Image in case you cannot boot Windows. However if your hard disk fails this last method won't work and you will need some bootable media to boot from.

Thank you.
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Ilya Toytman

 

John and Ilya first of all thanks for the information, now for my dumb question 5,0000
If my Hard Drive fails, how can I even get the CD drive or A drive work? I guess that might sound dumb, but computers are still a learning experience to me at 75
I do have an Acromis bootble CD for the Notebook so If I can't get the system to boot up due to a hard drive failure all I have to do is put the cd in the drive and it should autmatically boot up

 

You don't need a hard drive to boot a PC.
Whether the HD is working fine, broken, or missing, you can still boot a PC off of a floppy or CD-ROM.

 

See I did sound dumb
Thanks so ow all I would have t do is put the CD in to get a boot up.
Can I ask this one more thing on the same subject. After I use the bootup disc of Acronis, will that then allow me to find the exteral harddrive or is there more I have to do.

 

When you boot from the rescue CD, you can select where you'd like to restore from, what image you want to restore, and where you would like to restore to.

Of course, it'd be a good practice to boot with the CD to do a trial run to make sure things are working. Just do an image verify rather than restore.

 

Not at all.

The only dumb question is the one that's never asked.



snowbound

 

How thoughtfull and caring, thanks snowbound

 

Hello Mickyk

Not quite. You'll probably need to enter your notebook's BIOS setup and select the CD ROM as the first boot device. Reset the BIOS to boot from the hard drive once you've carried out an image check or restore.

Regards

 

Hello Mickyw,

In addition to Menorcaman's post, to enter the BIOS settings you need to power on the computer and press the "Del" button (the way for most computers). In the menu which will appear please choose something like "Advanced BIOS features" (the exact name depends on BIOS) and choose the boot sequence. Set your CD drive as your first boot device. After that please press the "Esc" button and choose "Save and exit". The more exact details are written in the manual for your computer (I can't tell the exact information because it depends on your computer model).

If you have further questions concerning Acronis True Image please feel free to ask them either here on this forum or via e-mail support@acronis.com.

Thank you.
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Ilya Toytman