Attempted restore failed, turned my prim part into unallocated space

Hi

I have Vista installed on one hard disk with two partitions, the OS is on C and my backup images I have stored on D. I am using acronis true image home 2009 and I attempted to restore a (.tib) image stored on partition D to partition C, "sector by sector" and did not select to restore the MBR. The restore failed instantaneously and my drive C has now become "unallocated" (shows up as such in acronis). I gather I cant restore an image to an "unallocated" partition as acronis will not let me select partition C as my target. Why did drive C become unallocated and how can I restore the image back onto C?

Please let me know if further information is needed to understand the problem,

Thank you

 

Try restoring the C drive again and use the unallocated space as the target. That is what I would do in all previous versions of TI.
If that does not work try again with an earlier image if you have one.

Was there no message when the restore failed?

Xpilot

 

Acronis does not allow me to choose the unallocated partition as the target (greyed out)

 

fred25,
I would boot from the TI Rescue CD when performing any restore of your system partition.

 

I think I had that problem a couple of times. Is the unallocated space formatted? Maybe reformattting the partition and then try restoring it.

 

I had the same problem. It was a new disk, partitioned and formatted. It happened several times. I tried with and without restoring the MBR (as well as the contents of the partition). In the end, I reinstalled basic Windows (Vista), and was then able to restore my complete OS partition from a backup.

I only use TI for restoring the OS, so for me this is a very serious bug.

 

That happened to me very often. This is what I do.
There is a program called "MiniPE-XT". Search for it through Google.
This allows to format unallocated disk (this takes just a few seconds) and also to change drive letter (If you have D-hard disk, it becomes C-drive. The drive must be changed into D-drive in order assign the unallocated disk as "C"-drive). Then, you could easily restore c-parition with a rescue or BartPE disk. That's the way I have been doing.

 

I reallocated and formatted the space using a Windows installation disk - no problem there. The problem is that whenever you try to restore a backup, TI deallocates it again!

 

I haven't tried to restore a sector by sector image, only used image space. I wonder if this is where the problem is, in that sector by sector is assumed to be to a complete volume rather than a partition.

Was the image made as a sector by sector?

 

I've restored many different backups over an existing OS on C: without problems. I wasn't aware of doing anything differently this time, except that it was a new hard disk. I'm pretty sure that only C: was involved, as I usually check the size of the partition that's being restored, as well as the destination partition, to make sure that I don't accidentally restore into the wrong partition. Certainly, only the C: partition was deallocated by the attempted restore.