AOMEI Data Backuper 1.0

I have one Xp system partition that uses the Vista/Win7 boot manager and that works fine with smart sector backup and restore. All the Xp partitions that use the Xp boot manager require sector by sector back up and restore with Aomei Backupper. For Linux or any other system that the software isn't designed to handle, it is the safer option. It is really a boot sector issue, the partitions that haven't booted have been ok otherwise with all data intact. The reason that a sector by sector backup wouldn't boot on a larger disk would be that the boot sector would reference an absolute location on a disk that would be different on a different disk with different geometry. For a partition restored to the same disk with smart sector, it would be that the compression algorithm didn't restore the few critical boot sector bytes correctly. It isn't the empty sectors on the disk that are the problem, it is how the used sectors are compressed and restored. Even with a sector by sector backup, the empty sectors aren't put into the disk image and the disk image size is the size of the data used on the disk. With Smart Sector backup, the used sectors are further compressed. Sector by Sector backup and restore is actually faster due to smart sector compression taking more time to execute but the resulting disk images are larger.

 

@MisterB, Thanks for the info.