Free alternative to Acronis True Image?

you would think so. im sure thats what i had to do. it will definatly work.
report back and tell me if it worked or not.
feel free to ask questions.

 

Well, I did all you said, and I thought this is going to be so easy.

The iso file got written to the pebuilder folder as expected and then I installed that nice little burncdcc you linked and it burned the iso fine.

However, on booting with the BartPE newly made disk, I was thinking how long it was taking to load the white bars, but thought it must be because all the xp files have to be loaded from the cd and is therefore bound to take longer.

But then... BSOD with some error message.

I thought this BartPE was supposed to be so good. Looks like something isn't right here so will probably just use the Linux method now as I had no problems at all booting from there.

Anyway lodore, many thanks for the quick response there, but looks like BartPE is not going to be for me this time, unless there is some simple reason for it failing on my system here.

 

your welcome.
was there any build errrors?
it may be worth doing the build process again and then burning another cd just incase it was a bad burn.

 

Guess what,

I did just that a little while ago because I was not happy that it had blue screened me like that. So this time I used the same iso file but decided to burn it to the same RW disk, but before I did, I preformed a full erase rather than the quick one, and I also used my Nero software as it can also burn image files.

So... rebooted with newly burned disk... and it worked.

I was so pleased so I think you were spot on... a bad burn.

Even though burncdcc is a neat little app for doing iso's I reckon I can ditch that now as Nero did the job ok.

I am now just wondering if there is any way to increase the boot up time with BartPE... maybe delete some unnecessary files from there. I was reading a forum somewhere that seemed to be suggesting this could be done.

Anyway lodore... many thanks to you on this one.

It's now very late here in Uk... 1.40 am... so must get some rest now.

I will do some more testing tomorrow evening... I enjoy things like this.

 

I like Clonezilla. It's open source. Does the job quite well.

 

Now that I've got the BartPE Rescue Disk working ok, I'm still a bit concerned at the seemingly slow boot times from switching the computer on to actually getting to be able to use the computer from the Bart Go Button.

I've done some timings and they break down as follows:

1) From switching on computer to getting to the Windows XP Boot Logo takes approx 2 min 20 secs.

2) From the Windows XP Boot Logo to the BartPE Blue Logo takes approx another 2 min 20 secs.

3) From the BartPE Blue Logo to getting the Bart Go Button takes approx 1 min 20 secs.

Can anyone confirm these times are more or less correct bearing in mind that all the files are now loading from the CD. I obviously expected the boot to take longer from the CD but is 6 mins from switching on to being able to use considered to be normal.

I used a CD-RW to create the disk as I didn't want to start using up my stock of CD-R if it wasn't going to work, so not sure if this is something to do with it but I don't see why it should matter... unless it does.

I also copied the Macrium plugin as directed, into the Bart plugin folder before building the CD, and this appears correct as the Macrium options are there ready to be used.

So apart from the slow boot everything seems to be working correctly.

 

Well, just for comparative purposes (because there may be many factors involved here), on a fairly old P4 machine running XP (SP3), from "Off to GO" takes ~3 minutes.

 

Thanks for that prius04,

My system is reasonably fast usually, 2 Ghz P4 also running SP3. So I'm taking twice as long as you there. It's not a big issue because the Linux boot works perfectly and is very fast to load... restores then work like a charm. I did have one issue when required to use 2 DVD's with just the finalized index required on the second one seem to mess up the backup process, but after doing some work on that... everything went really well and so fast.

But I would like to find out more on the BartPE side of things as it's a very useful tool to have anyway and so will probably first create a disk minus the Macrium plugin as a starter. I was going to investigate the possibility of taking some features out of BartPE but won't go into that here as this would be off topic.

Certainly I would have to say that as a free alternative to Acronis TI, which even though I've not used but have seen many posts regarding issues with it, then Macrium is excellent.

BTW... did try Paragon HDM last night, but whilst the backup went ok, the restore was a nightmare with the files being loaded so slow and just taking forever. Did find the partitioning feature good with that, so I may try some more tests with it later so see if I can get restores to load quicker.

Paragon DBE is not really in the running for me as it doesn't do images to a DVD... but maybe to a file on a backup partition or USB drive would be worth a try for me at a later date... just to see how it goes.

 

hi, rw cd's are very slow, sometimes only 2x. have you tried a normal cd? having said that, usb drives are the way to go for ease and speed, but i still like to keep real emergency cd's. i have picked rw disks before thinking they were empty and you always know whats on a 'read only'

 

Hi gazzacbr,

I did wonder if using RW's may be a factor and so from what you say this could indeed be the problem. I will do some more tests later using a straight burn to CD-R and see if this gives me a speed increase.

Thanks.