Making Bootable Rescue Disk

I was unable to make a bootable CD using the Create Bootable Rescue Media portion of True Image home. I have a PlexWriter Premium CD burner. It would also not work on my Plextor PX-708A CD/DVD burner. True Image made an ISO image very quickly, and I was fairly easily able to make a boot disk using Nero 7 Burning ROM using the ISO disk function. The disk boots and gives me the True Image Home menu. Just posting this to help anyone else having this problem, and curious as to why this would be, since I purchased this product with the idea that it uses DVD or CD drives without any additional software. I now will need to test if the program can make backups using these drives.

 

To create a Rescue CD : create an ISO-file with ATI first and burn that ISO-file with a reliable third party DVD/CD burning software. That's the best and safest way.

If you are planning to use DVD/CD's as backup media for your harddisks, don't do it. It's cheaper, but that is the only advantage of using DVD/CD. A failure in restoring from DVD/CD is quite expensive in time and time = money.

Use an internal or an external harddisk as backup media : "Disk to Disk" and NOT "Disk to DVD/CD", unless you like to lose your system and/or data partition.
Use DVD/CD's for storing movies, music, photos, ... that was their original purpose and it still is.

 

I have no problem using Acronis to create a rescue CD. This applies to all builds since version 8 to the current Version 9 build. It is possible that your installed third party disk writing tools are grabbing the CD when you insert it and Acronis is getting sidelined. You could try only inserting the CD when the creation tool calls for it. This should work or an alternative would be to disable your Nero software.

Xpilot

 

Hello joltar,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

If you would like to investigate the issue with creating Acronis True Image Bootable CD "directly" from Acronis True Image please explain your step-by-step actions which you took that led you to this issue. Did you received any error messages? Also these workarounds in case you cannot create Acronis True Image Bootable CD might be helpful.

Thank you.
--
Aleksandr Isakov

 

These statements are just not correct. One of the major advantages of having backups on DVD/CDs is portability; if your house or business burns up you can still go to your DVD/CDs that you placed in your safety deposit box. Depending on the exact composition of the media you use (dyes, etc.), DVD/CDs are very reliable with some media designed to last 100 years. Now writing directly to the media may be problematical but using software to write the .tib files to DVD/CDs after you have backed up your programs/data/os to a hard drive or external device is a time tested and reliable way of backing up. I believe that most of the complaints in the recovery of data from DVD/CDs is related to the fact that Acronis uses Linux to write their programs and because of this, these programs need an almost exact match for a hardware driver to support hardware in an emergency boot situation (before windows). Hardware is always changing, therefore if you need acronis to backup your data/OS/Programs, whatever, then you need either to obtain (1) the hardware that Acronis supports or (2) ask Acronis to write a driver for the incompatible hardware that you currently have. I emphasize option number 2 because I have found Acronis to be extremely responsive to requests for help in this area. I have found that they are always very responsive to your requests, but remember that how quickly they write drivers is always subject to where they are in their development cycle, how many requests they get for a particular piece of hardware, etc. This is a fact of life for any software company and reflects reality. Remember these comments only apply to the rescue media that you create from their software; using Acronis in Windows is different because it then utiltizes the drivers employed by whatever brand of Windows you are using. DVD/CDs are the backup of last resort when everything else has failed and you have to get your data back. Even in that case, if the Acronis rescue media fails, you can always install a minimal windows partition, install Acronis True Image, then reinstall your data from the Acronis .tib files on your DVD/CDs. Other problems that people bring up at his point are usually due to actual hardware failure and are not attributable to Acronis. Hint: after the natural disaster that has destroyed your PC, you will be buying a new PC (so hardware failure is even more unlikely since it is new stuff [possible but extremely remote]) and you will be using the DVD/CDs that you stored at a remote site to get back up and running again. Heck, at this point you could even copy the .tib files to an external hard drive and then restore your PC. The point is that there are lots of ways to get your irreplaceable data back; but none of them work without those .tib files in the first place that you stored in a remote location.