Image Restore blindspot..?

Hi All,
I encountered something which puzzled me the whole night yesterday.
I did a True Image backup of my C partition a week ago.
Yesterday while installing some beta video-edit SW, some drivers got corrupted and I get that 'Death Blue Screen' from my Win2000 when I reboot. 'Luckily' I had done a TrueImage CD rescue disk, and I promptly booted with that and 'restored' my C partition with the TrueImage backup that I did a week ago.
The restoration was done quickly, about 6 mins for a 9Gig/4Gig-used partition.
BUT, when I boot up I still get that 'Death Blue Screen', i.e I couldn't bootup at all. My understanding is, when you restore the C partition, it should revert back to the 'healthy' copy that was backed-up. Unless the TrueImage copy of partition C was not a 'TrueCopy'..

I never had this problem when I was using Ghost.
Anyone has similar experience?

Rgds,
Andy

 

When you back up your C: partition TI does not include the MBR in the backup. This is because the MBR resides outside the partition. If your MBR is corrupted then restoring C: pertition doesn't fix the MBR. You need to 'fixmbr' yourself for the system to boot correctly.

If you want TI to include MBR in the backup then you must select to backup the 'disk' and not just the C: partition. Also you must restore the 'disk' not just the C: partition. If you have more than one partition on the disk then you need to think about what you are doing before you restore the whole drive. If you only have C: partition on that drive then it's no problem to create an image of the whole disk and restore the whole disk. This method will include MBR and you will not have to fixmbr as a second operation.

 

Hello andrewte,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

pjb024 is not completely correct. Of course pjb024 is right when saying that MBR is included in the entire disk image only, but however it is not necessary for you to create an image of the entire hard drive in case you are planning to restore an image of the system partition to the same disk. If your MBR did not get corrupted or changed then you should be able to successfully boot from the restored system partition. Even if your MBR has changed you can always boot from Windows 2000 Installation CD and run "fixmbr" command in Recovery Console in order to make your restored partition bootable.

The one more thing I should mention is that you receive the so called BSOD when trying to boot your PC. This means that Windows is trying to boot and your MBR is most likely ok.

Anyway, the first thing to try is to boot from Windows 2000 Installation CD and run "fixmbr" command in Recovery Console. If that does not help then please do the following:

- Download Acronis Report Utility;
- Run it on any other "healthy" computer and select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;
- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed
with creation of the bootable floppy;
- Boot the computer having the issue from this diskette and wait for the
report creation process to finish;
- Compress the report file from the floppy disk with ZIP.

Please send this report to support@acronis.com along with step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appeared and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Thanks pjb024 and Alexey. I will try the suggestion tonight.
So am I right to say that the current version of TI does not have
the option to backup the boot partition(in this case "C:\") and the MBR?

Initially I was thinking of creating a DVD bootable and store the boot partition
image on it as a 'all-in-one' rescue disk. If fixing MBR requires the Windows installation disk, then it becomes a 'all-in-two' solution doesn't it?
Is there anything else that is not being imaged when we backup an image of the boot partition? (Assuming the boot disk has more than one partition.)

Andy

 

You are right in your assumption that TI does not back up the MBR if you back up the boot partition alone. This is because the MBR is not part of the partition; it is external to the partition. To include MBR you must back up the 'complete' drive but that will also back up any other partitions you have and to restore MBR you have to restore the 'complete' disk which of course means that you are restoring all partitions not just the boot partition.

If you are restoring the boot partition to the same drive then you may not have to restore MBR to make it bootable. This is because MBR is not changed by restoring the boot partition alone and it may still be intact. If it is not intact then yes you have to resort to fixing the MBR.

I think it would be a nice improvement if MBR could be selected for backup along with the boot partition. It seems logical to be able to do that as you may want to restore the boot partition and MBR but not affect other partitions on that drive.

 

Please be aware of the following:
In an oversimplified way one could say that there is no really "boot partition" on a drive.

There are just (primary) partitions and each of the partitions include a partition boot record.
Outside of all partitions (in the first sector of the drive) is the master boot sector which includes the MBR in the very beginning of this sector, followed by the DiskID and Partition Table. The Partition Table tells which partition should be used this time as "boot partition".

If you image any partition of the drive, the partition boot record of that partition is included in the image.
So, if you only image your "System partition" the partition boot record of the system partition is included, but the Master Boot Sector with the MBR is not included because it is outside and not part of the system partition.

If you also want to include that Master Boot Sector, you have to image the whole drive (not an individual partition).