Back up not cloning to make boot of OS

I am trying to review V10 on windows XP home. and wish to make a backup of my operating system from the Master drive onto the slave drive which is partitioned so that I can restore via a boot off the back up copy if the Master drive OS fails. The back up is successful but it is in a series of sub folders and I cannot see how if I was to make the slave the Master it would boot from the primary partition that holds the image . Can you advise if I have done something wrong and what to do to fix it?


I tried Back up not cloning. Used the back up entire C drive (only has the OS and 2 programs on it) and then made a back up file to the E drive

I cannot see how the E drive will boot from a backup file extension. I thought the idea is that the PC if the E drive is connected as main drive it will boot into the backed up copy. But it is a back up file with compression

 

The Backup Image has to go through the Recover process to another drive before it will make that drive bootable like the original.

 

You are correct. As DwnNDrty said, a backup image is not bootable. You restore the image to a drive, and that drive is bootable.

The backup plan that you are suggesting (having an exact copy of your boot drive's boot partition on a slave drive) isn't a good backup plan. It's a lot better to store images of the boot drive on the second drive. That way, you can save more than one backup since they are compressed.

When there is a problem with your boot drive, or you want to return to an earlier state, you simply restore the image to the boot drive. If you can't boot from that drive, you boot from the TrueImage Recovery CD and do the restore from there.

 

Thanks. I wanted to have just an image of the original setup on a small partition on the slave drive so that I could very quick;ly make it a master if the original OS Master crashed.

So the way I have it now - I should make a recovery CD and in the event of the crash - Plug in the Slave with the image(make it now the master drive) and then use the recovery CD to access the back up image ?

Correct?

Otherwise I was going to try the clone tool but it seems to want to delete the partitions I already have on the slave drive. Not that this would be a problem yet as there is nothing on the other drive and partitions yest (otherthan the back up image I made and may delete now)

Bit more advise please?

Mike

 

If you want to be able to swap drives for your recovery then you want to make a "Clone". A clone is an exact copy of your drive and that is why it wants to delete the partitions on the other drive. You may want to read Need Help? These Beginner's Guides May Fill That Need!. A Backup image has to be restored in order for it to be usable as a booting system. See this thread How to restore to a replacement hard drive.
Cloning is usually used to replace the old drive with a larger new one while a backup image is a snapshot in time of your disk. Some folks Clone all the time. If you choose to use the Clone approach disconnect the newly cloned drive before rebooting. Otherwise windows may become confused.

 

That sounds reasonable, but there are some tricks needed to make this work. Thomasjk covered some of them.

If you want to use only part of the slave drive for the copy of your boot partition without destroying other partitions on the drive, you cannot use the Clone tool. As you found, a clone is an exact copy of an entire drive (not just a partition), so everything on the slave would be wiped out.

You could however, restore the image of the boot partition to this partition on the Slave drive. The image cannot be saved on the partition to which you will be restoring the image, so move it to another location or create a new image in a different location. Be sure to chose Active when restoring the image since this may be used as a boot drive.

Now, if you change the boot drive in the BIOS to the Slave drive, you should be able to boot from that drive.

You could do this, but I don't think it's a very good idea. It's not how I would backup my system.

Now, this takes us back to how I would backup the system if it were mine. You save an Image of the boot partition on the Slave drive. You make a Recovery CD so that you can boot the system in the event that the Master drive fails or the boot partition becomes corrupted. At no tome will you need to change the jumpers on the Slave drive or it's setting in BIOS.

Case I. The boot drive becomes corrupted and won't boot, but is still functional
a. You boot from the Recovery CD.
b. You restore the image from the Slave back to the Master to the same partition that was originally the boot partition.
c. You remove the Recovery CD and boot the system.

Case II. The boot drive fails completely and has to be discarded
a. You remove the Master/boot drive.
b. You install a new Master drive.
c. You boot from the Recovery CD.
d. You restore the image from the Slave back to the new Master and restore the MBR as well.
e. You remove the Recovery CD and boot the system.

OK?

 

Well it is getting much clearer thanks.

I have created a retore CD and tried accessing the Back up and now an incremental on the slave and could do this.

So in the event of the Master failing I would access the slave where the back up image is kept and then restore this? Correct? or copy it back across to the Master.

BUT what would I copy back to the master? The image would not allow a boot? I am still confused about how I make the image a bootable file that puts me bcak to the clean XP OS boot without using the recovery CD after the first bit to access the back up.


Does this make sense?

Recover back to the image and then use this image as my boot back at the master, but how.

Again appreciate the help.

Mike

 

That's good to hear.

That's great news. If you can see the image on the slave, you can also use the Validate option to confirm that it can be read correctly by TrueImage.

When you boot from the Recovery CD and select Recovery, you will be asked what image to use. You select the image on the Slave drive. You will then be asked what drive and partition to restore the image to, and you select the boot partition on the Master drive. TrueImage will then uncompress the image and write it to the boot partition of the Master drive. When the restore process is complete, you remove the CD and boot the system. Magic! Your system will boot up just like it was when you made the image.

Actually, you can boot from the Recovery CD and go all the way through the selection of the image (source) and the Master partition (target) but STOP before clicking the Proceed button. You can then click cancel to exit.