how to restore image to a usb hard drive

My hardrive in my old laptop crashed, but I have an image of it from when I first bought it. I've gotten a new hard drive, but since I have no CD-ROM or other kinds of drives on my laptop, I have put the new drive in an external USB enclosure, plugged it into another computer that has true image 9 and the image I want to restore.

I start up true image, then:

* click "restore image"
* select my image
* enter yes or no to verify image
* plug and unplug usb drives until it shows my new drive
* select my new drive - under "Partition or disk to restore"
* select my new drive AGAIN - under "Restored Hard Disk Drive Location"
* enter yes or no to do another image
* click proceed on the next page
* message instantly pops up saying "The image was successfully restored" (this should take several minutes at least).

Needless to say, nothing was done to my new drive. Image was NOT restored. Am I doing something wrong?

 

This is the first time I've had to use the image I created, so I didn't realize the first drive selection screen was the IMAGE drive selection. Even still, it must have a bug to show me PHYSICAL drives on the working computer when I plug and unplug one of them.

So anyway, I got it to work, the image seems to have been transferred, though it was much faster than I expected it to be - only 3 minutes for 3 gig of data, not including empty formatted space.

I popped it back into my laptop, and when trying to boot, it just gives me a black screen with a blinking cursor, so I'm not sure what to do next. Could the drive not be bootable for some reason? Any troubleshooting ideas to figure out why my restored image isn't booting?

 

I've found some references to something called "universal restore" that solves what may be my problem: Restoring an image to a new drive that is slightly different from the original. Can anyone tell me if I can do this from a seperate computer, with the destination drive in a USB enclosure, or is it a quirky requirement that it must be done from the actual computer with a CD drive installed too?

 

Hello qwasty,

To restore the image to a new drive that will go into the same computer the image came from you don't need Universal Restore and you can perform the restoration on another machine, as you did.

There must be something else keeping the new drive from booting. The Master Boot Record should have been imaged and restored. To achieve that the simple way the box next to Drive 1 should be ticked both upon imaging and restoring.

When you start the Recovery Wizard, you first select the image file to use for the restoration. On the next screen you select what you are going to restore from within that image file and it's here that you should have Disk 1 ticked. If you can't do that, tell us what you see on this screen and the Build numbers of TI installed on either computer.

Also tell how you would like the new drive set up if it's larger then the old one.

 

Both hard drives are 55.89GB (60GB), both are "Travelstar" but the old one says IBM on it and the new one says Hitachi. I'm betting they're both identical Hitachi drives.

I've done everything exactly as you described it. I'm using workstation 9.1 build 3718 on the computer I'm using to restore the image, and I selected for it to restore the entire drive, including the MBR. I used version 8 to make the image, but I don't know the build number.

If that should have worked, then I have no idea why it didn't. The laptop doesn't give any errors when I try to boot up with the restored drive, it just sits there with a blinking cursor.

 

That would be your problem if the imaged drive had multiple partitions and you only imaged one partition -- the MBR would not have been backed up in that case.

THen you'd have to use the fixmbr command within the Win XP recovery console or another utility that could do the same.

 

I wonder ... The Disk 1 box shouldn't have accepted the tick if the image was not of the whole disk. Also, the MBR got ticked too if I understand qwasty correctly.

But I have no idea now.

Anyway, the drives need not be the same make or the same size at all.

 

Yes, the MBR got ticked too when I did the restore. Interestingly, when I tried a restore with my old version 8, it showed no MBR, but version 9.1 DOES show an MBR. I did the restore with version 9.1, ticked "Disk 1", which then auto-ticked everything below it including the MBR.

 

Right, everything seems perfect, except for the outcome.

The MBR was introduced as a separate item in Build 3567 of TI 9.0 Home in mid-April. In version 8 the MBR would not show, but it would be silently included in imaging/restoring when the whole disk was selected.

 

Dear Original Poster,

I use TI on my laptop "A Lot"... I found several tricks that work for me.

Have you tried this:

Take the Laptop drive in question use your USB connection and work for another system that has the same OS. Repartition the laptop drive and format the laptop drive with the host machine then apply the image to the Laptop drive while still connected to the host. The Size of partion must be greater then the image data size and the number of partions may very remember to use verification on making/resoring Images.

If the Laptop still gives you the blank screen take a boot 98se disk use fdisk to make sure the booting partition is set as active and bootable.

I hope this helps.

korona

 

On bootup, I see the usual BIOS screen where the ram is tested, drives detected, etc. Then I see the message:

Initializing Intel(R) Boot Agent Version 4.0.18
PXE 2.1 Build 083 (Wfm 2.0)

And then, it switches back to the BIOS screen, and it all blanks to a black screen with blinking cursor in the upper left quadrant (not at the top) of the screen.

I can't boot from USB devices on the laptop in question, but on the other one that I used to perform the image restore, I tried booting from the same drive when it's in the USB enclosure. It tried to boot, then said something to the effect that windows had to restart to prevent damage to hardware or whatever. In short, the boot was working, but it didn't go well for some reason.

Anyway, the drive is bootable, and I don't get even that far when the drive is in my laptop.

 

That's exactly what I've been doing. I'm using a borrowed laptop to restore the image on a new drive for my laptop. The drives are the same size and the same brand, but they have slight differences in appearance.

* I used verification on my image, it comes out OK.
* I don't have any CD's or CDROM drives I can use.
* I don't have any floppy drives on either computer.

 

Ok,
Can you get to a desktop?

there is one other option that I have used... and this will take some time and can not be interrupted.

Take USB Latop drive to host machine for partition the laptop drive to the sizes you want, format the drives Fat32 make C: bootable as example

C: 20gb What ever you want
D: make 1gb can be dumped after...

Copy the OS CD to D:

Then you may modify autoexe.bat to include ramdisk (I cant recall the exact name windows will give you a warning that is will take longer to install what windows does not mention is it will a "Heck of a long time to install"). if you dont include that setting it will take 18-20 hours to install but will install.

Reinstall Laptop drive and start system. then Run windows setup.

After install if windows boots and things look ok... make a backup image of the laptop drive... then reinstall image the is one originaly wanting. If the same problem occurs the the Image may be bad...

Take new image and apply... if it starts ok... then original image is bad... if it fails then it is a Driver/TI incompatability with Laptop.

Hope this helps.

korona

 

Dear poster,

What is the Laptop Make and Model?

korona

 

I don't know how to setup the C and D partitions like you suggested, can TI do that? Also, I have already tried simply copying the cd contents to the drive, but it still does not boot. I didn't quite follow your autoexec.bat instructions. I need to change some parameters?

 

Yes,

TI and DD both do the repartition... I am suggesting an external software to do such actions to narrow the problem down...

korona

 

OK, I used True Image to get a 1GB primary partition, and the remaining 54GB as a logical drive. Now, I just need to copy the XP installation files to the 1GB primary partition and look at autoexec.bat to enable ramdisk?

The laptop I am trying to prepare this drive for is an IBM Thinkpad T23. The other laptop I'm using True Image on to prepare the drive is an IBM Thinkpad T40.