Another bad experience!

I really am beginning to despair of ATI. Having had to resort to a VistaPE disk to get either ATI 10 or 11 to see all the drives on my Vista PC I have now turned my attention to my laptop. The laptop has ATI 10 installed in XP (SP2) and also has Mandriva using the Grub bootloader.

Every attempt to create the ATI 10 Rescue CD hangs, leaving the CD in an unusable state. Nevertheless I went ahead and created an image of XP from Windows to an external drive and this worked OK. I then tried to restore that image from Windows, for which the system has to reboot. I was able to select both image and destination, but on OK the restore aborted and the system rebooted to Grub.

At least my VistaPE disk works just as well on the laptop as it does on the PC, so at least I am safe, but if I hadn't had that to fall back on I would have been in a bit of a fix to say the least!

After my fruitless attempts to fix ATI on the PC with help from Acronis Support I don't think I even want to know what I should try to do to fix it on the laptop. I'll just rely on VistaPE and leave it at that.

But what a mess this programme is! It simply isn't in a fit state to be offered to joe public.

 

A couple of things can cause problems in making the rescue CD.

1. CD utilities such as InCD running in the background, will almost always cause this to grind to a halt.

Solution temporarily disable InCD, Nero Image Tool etc - these claim exclusive use of files that TI needs to access.

2. A strangeness that has been around since v8 - you might need to open the CD drawer, plonk the CD in and then let TI close the drawer.

Colin

 

There aren't any programmes running. The lappie is normally only used as a wireless terminal to the Vista PC, so only has XP, Radmin and ATI 10 on it. Once I come down off the ceiling I'll try your cd tip, and also try creating an iso instead. That's a bit of a faff though, due to not having burning software on board.

 

I agree - I have been a fan of Acronis from version 6 but do think they should have made it clean that as Vista is still in beta that Acronis could not guarantee success.

Just re-read your 1st post and see you are having troubles with Xp as well - sorry.

 

LOL...yes, it seems they rushed the so called 'Vista Compatible' out the door to the consumer for 'money in pocket' (notice the post of refunds hard to get) and not with the actual Vista customer. They should have the honesty to at least put 'Vista Compatible' (50/50)

 

If you got the VistaPE disk, you're better off with that than an ATI boot disk. The Vista disk will run ATI faster on msost setups besides running on more setups period. This is one case were the workaround (VistaPE) is the fix and the standard operation (ATI Boot CD) is the kludge.

 

Yep, that's the conclusion I've come to too.

But in another thread MudCrab gives links to a method of making USB peripheral drives bootable with ATI, so you could use that one drive for both backup and restore in addition to storing your images.

Has anyone found this method to be as good as/better than VistaPE, or have any other comments about it?

 

My only comment is that you can make multiple copies of your VistaPE cd and they don't take up much storage space. And that would be less expensive that making several usb drives for the same purpose.

 

You can setup your USB hard drive as desired and then follow the VistaPE flashdrive instructions to finish the setup. Just treat the USB hard drive as the flashdrive (the process is identical).

You can either create a small VistaPE partition on the USB hard drive (a 500MB - 1GB Primary FAT32/NTFS partition) and then create an NTFS partition in the remaining space for backups OR you can use one large Primary FAT32 or NTFS partition. If you use just one partition, then you'll probably want to create some "backup" folders to keep your backups ordered and out of the VistaPE files. Note that if your USB hard drive is already how you want it (in one large Primary FAT32/NTFS partition, for example) you can put VistaPE on it without needing to reformat.

I've have the instructions for doing this on a flashdrive written up here:
Create a VistaPE USB Flashdrive
These were created using WinBuilder 072a and VistaPE 10, but work exactly the same with WinBuilder 074 and VistaPE 11.

I plan to add a "plain" VistaPE-only version, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Currently, it uses Grub4DOS as the boot manager (same as the VistaPE CD). This allows the easy addition of multiple setups on one flashdrive (or USB hard drive). I put two VistaPE setups, BartPE and Acronis (TI 10, TI 11 and DD 10) all in one partition on my current test flashdrive.

If you need to update your VistaPE build after you've created your VistaPE flashdrive or USB hard drive, you just need to copy the updated VistaPE files over to the drive and you're finished (Step 2 in the instructions).

 

Plenty to go at there when I get a quiet day. Thanks