Clarification Needed Drive Backup 9.0

In Drive Backup under "what to backup" my system lists the second item "First Hard Disk Track" What the heck is this? There are also 0 bites listed in this item along with the MBR item.

Next, with respect to the (3) HDDs installed, HDD 0 in the tree list is were the OS is installed on c:/ partition "60GB" and were F:/ partition "51.7GB" "not used" equals 120GB total for HDD 0. In the event of MBR corruption or HDD 0 meltdown, If I image partition C:/ for backup, upon reimage of same partition reinstalls the complete C:/ partition data as well as unused space within that partition correct?

Also, say I have HDD failure, I replace the drive in question with same type/size drive and install image of C:/ partition, "60GB" on the 120GB Drive, would I have access to the remainder of that 120GB drive 51.7GB without a complete Drive image both partition C:/ & F:/

 

Hello Lanker,

You can restore a partition to its original resize or utilize all the available space. During the restore wizard you should have a sliding bar or option to type in the new partition space.

 

Hi lanker,

The First Track is the beginning section of your hard disk that contains your Master Boot Record. The MBR is required for Windows to boot properly, but it is not absolutely necessary to include this in your backups. If you are restoring a bootable partition to a blank drive, we will automatically build an MBR for you. If there is one already, we will update it to ensure it is compatible. You can also back this up separately and restore it on demand in case of corruption.

I recommend that you check the box next to Basic Disk 0, and have it backup all of the the drive components. When you restore from this, you can choose to restore the entire drive and increase your partitions proportionally, or you can choose the Local Disks out of the list, one by one, and adjust the new partition sizes exactly as you see fit.

By default the partitions will want to restore as their original sizes, with the original free space amounts. If you backup a 60GB C, and restore it to a 120GB drive, you could either restore it as the original size and use the remaining unallocated space for a new partition, or you can stretch the partition to include that additional free space as Tommy mentioned.

 

OK thanks that helped answer my questions.

 

Historically, MBR structured drives start the first partition on the second track. On any modern drive, you'll see that the first partition starts at sector 64 (zero based). Because of this, various software components have used the first track, after the MBR, to stuff information needed for special drive functions, like software RAID configurations. Some software licensing packages also use that space to store license keys. So if you have anything like that, you want that track backed up so you don't lose the information on a restore.

Sadly, you probably don't know if any software is using that space. There are no rules. The user only finds out when two programs collide and the software activation trashes the RAID configuration (most egregious) and the user loses all their data.