Changing partitions to be backed up.

Hi There,

I have Acronis Home v11 on XP SP2 on an ACER laptop. My one physical disk is split into 3 partitions. The first holds an ACER recovery image that shipped with the computer, the second is my system partition (C: drive) and the third is a data partition (D: drive). I have successfully created a full back up of the entire disk and i regularly do incremmental backups but I have two questions:

1. When I do an new incremental backup can I choose to just do a backup of a specific partition as opposed to backing all three partitions. The GUI seems to allow me to do such an operation but I just wanted to now if there any problems with doing such a thing?

2. Can I create a new full backup of only my second partition (the system C: drive) an expect to successfully recover only that partition. My reason for this being that I'm not really interested in keeping the ACER image (the first partition) as I now have Acronis to recover with and the data partition (the third patition) can be backed up as a data backup rather than being included in a image.

 

Yes, you can only backup one partition. That's how I do it, I just use True image to backup my c: partition. Same with incrementals, you only have to do the one you want. I never backup or restore the entire hard drive(clone), it can take hours to do that type of procedure.

The c: partition that you backup can be restored on another hard drive by itself and be bootable, whether you backup the MBR or not. The only problem is since your using windows xp and it's installed on a multi partition hard drive, during the restoration the drive letters might get changed. But thats a quick fix. As long as you have a good saved image of your c: partition you can restore it and it will work.

Just remember anything that causes the restored drive not to boot will probably be drive letter related or possibly hardware related (with a laptop). Both fixable.

 

If the restored C: partition won't boot how can i fix it?

 

broonie,

I agree. Use Acronis TI to image your C: drive. Forget about the recovery partition. Use data backup software for your data partition.

 

Hello broonie,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for delayed response.

Since the system partition is second one on the disk, most likely the system file boot.ini (located in the root of C reflects that. When you restore only the system partition on a clear drive, it will become the first partition, and boot.ini file will need to be modified accordingly.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

My boot.ini has no reference to the ACER recovery partition at all so i take it that a restore of my C: drive should work OK without need to edit the boot.ini?

 

Hello broonie,

We are sorry for delayed response.

Could you please post the contents of your boot.ini file?

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov