Installation CD and Cloning

Hi all,

I've had ATI Home 10.0 for a while now and have always used cloning from within windows (I clone to a 80GB eSATA drive) as my back up routine on my machine. Yes, I know it's a little unorthodox, but this enables me to boot straight into the cloned HDD if there was ever a failure in the first HDD. It doesn't take long to do so I've settled into this little routine. Also, out of four other boxes I have, three of them (for other members of the family) are all of the same build, so I can simply take this to any of the others and boot as required.

Now, with that out of the way, as mentioned I clone from within windows, but recently found the installation CD is actually bootable. Question is, can I use the installation CD to perform the cloning, irrespective of whether ATI Home is installed on the target machine? I'm thinking about getting another one of these external drives (on special with 500GB HDD) to make a copy of about 400GB of data on the other forth machine/pseudo-desktop-server.

So in summary, can ATI Home Install CD literally boot in another machine which doesn't have ATI Home installed (above pseudo-server) and clone the disk?

Secondly, from just searching now, I've read that cloning from the Install CD is recommended compared to performing it via Windows. On a scale of 1-10 (10 being really recommended) how would you rate this recommendation and are they any caveats?

Cheers for all your help.

 

yes you can

the licence is only for 1 pc i'd imagine, but you can use the livecd on any machine

 

You beauty

Yes I only have ATI installed on my machine as I'm the only one in the clan needing a full backup with high availability (RAID would only solve one of those).

The CD however, would come in handy to clone the server-side data.


Thanks for your response.

 

Just be sure that your current boot CD contains the latest build of TI. For TI 10, the latest build is 4942 as of today. If the CD contains an older build then you should make another boot CD by using the Bootable Media Builder application in the Windows version of the program.

 

I am wondering if you have actually tested the booting of one of your clones in a different computer to the one it was made on.
I had always understood that there were some hoops to go through first even if the computers were ostensibly identical.

Xpilot

 

Hi

Yes, I tested it and although windows does some readjusting and I think a reboot was needed, basic functionality was fine.



Back to my first post, I tested out cloning via the CD the other day and it took a while longer to complete the clone compared to when it is performed before windows bootup (ie. ATI installation-based). This isn't so much a problem, but the fact that after it finishes cloning, it reboots instead of turning off like it usually does when a pre-windows boot clone is scheduled. I'm a bit worried about yanking the power, so I'm wondering does ATI home 11 bootable CD resolve this? is there an option to turn the computer off after a clone is made, or have a i missed the option?

*Edit: workaround is to just let it reboot, have the CD Boot up again and at the TI boot screen, select 'Turn off computer'.