Crashed Hard Drive

My hard drive crashed big time. I have an image from True Image version 7 of my XP Home system and will want to install it on a new hard drive. I've been reading on this forum about getting a drive that's similar to my old one. What about this Sysprep Tool I'm reading about? Do I install that on the new drive? Do I install XP on the new drive before I install my image? The image has four partitions on it. Are there simple instructions somewhere?

Thanks,

Tom

 

It sounds like you have a "disk" image (contains 4 partitions) vs. a "partition" image. All you have to do is make sure the new HD is the same size, or bigger (better choice). You can restore an image to a smaller drive, but TI will have to resize the image. If your previous image is on multiple media, this may be impossible. Just buy a bigger HD.

Boot from your TI rescue disk and choose to restore the image. TI will do the rest, including partitioning and formatting. No need to do anything else.

 

That sound too good to be true. Great news! Thanks. My disk image is on a USB hard drive. Will the TI Rescue disk recognize it? Doesn't XP have be installed to see the USB connections?

Thanks again,

Tom

 

I do not have any experience with USB hard drives, but it is easy for you to find out. Even though your existing hard drive is dead, stick in your TI boot cd and connect your USB HD, and boot up with the CD. Choose Restore | Start and see if you can see the USB HD, and it's image, in TI. If you can see it in the source image window of TI, you're OK.

TI's website says:

Supported storage

Hard disk drives
Networked storage devices
CD-R(W)
DVD-RW, DVD+R(W)*
ZIP®, Jazz® and other removable media
P-ATA (IDE), S-ATA, SCSI, IEEE1394 (Firewire) and USB 1.0 / 2.0 drives, PC card storage devices.

Sounds like you shouldn't have a problem.

 

The rescue CD does see my USB external drive, though it is listed as drive B - which was a little unexpected.

 

Don't worry about what letter it assigns the drive. Remember your HD is dead. Although, I've neve seen a B:\ before!

 

TI Saved my Bacon

Just wanted to thanks the folks who helped me out. TI restored everything to my new hard drive and the world is wonderful again (at least my little corner of it).

Thanks again. Thanks to Acronis too! Great piece of software.

Tom