New WD USB drive-Need Help!

Hi all,

Finally, for Christmas I got a Western Digital 250GB USB My Book hard drive, very nice BUT I have a couple questions if any of you know some of these things I'd GREATLY appreciate your help:

1. I'm using Windows XP SP2 and all fixes installed.
2. I have an 80GB internal hardrive from Dell which seems to have 3 partitions on it (I understand this is normal)
3. I use Acronis TI 9.1 Workstation (Build 3718 ).
4. The WD drive seems to have come with a single partition of FAT32 from the factory. As stated above it 250GB.

OK just a few of questions:
1. I choose BACKUP option entire drive & choose all 3 partitions from the C: drive, is that my best option? I don't think Clone was correct for what I'm trying to achieve (able to recover the entire disk drive in case of a crash) but I'm just beginning to use my software, so your advice will be VERY HELPFUL!

2. When I looked at my WD drive I found Backup files *.TIB files after my first back-up (I found actually 3 *.TIB files with 1,2,3 appended to my file name), do those correspond to my 3 partitions or is it an entire backup in 3 no larger than 4GB pieces? Is that because my drive came from the factory FAT32 & not NTFS?

3. If the answer to #2 is because I have a Fat32 formatted drive, how can I format it NTFS to avoid multiple back-up files? Maybe XP has a utility but I'm not sure how to do this, any directions or guidance would be helpful.

4. Final question, if I did a restore from those 3 created back-ups, how would I do it today, restore backup part 1 then backup part 2 then backup part 3. Would my C: drive be complete at that point, you know registry, working applications, data etc.?

Thank you for any expert advice,

Steve

 

Yes it is a good idea to have a copy of your entire disk to restore your partition layout in case it gets scrubbed. You should also try to take a second copy of this.

If you are making regular backups you may find that this works best at the partition level. Some users put data on different partitions which fall naturally into different schedules of backup (e.g. system partition - once a month, data partition - daily, MP3 partition - once a flood).

If your disk did get scrubbed you could restore your disk image and then pour in the partition images. If you just wanted to restore a partition then obviously you would not need to restore the disk image first.

If you are using FAT32 then you will be limited to 4GB files.

Use the NT Convert utility from the command line, e.g. for the R: drive

Convert R: /FS:NTFS

ATI will handle it for you, just point it at the first file and make sure they are all present.

Yes. As it was when it was backed up.


Note that you should consider verifying the image after backup or before restore or both. I do both, but others choices vary.

F.

 

Foghorn,

Thank you SOOO much for your reply, I feel like using this software is a mystery & your help is greatly appreciated and I now understand things better with your help. I do just have one final question you said the way to convert my new USB to NTFS was with the command:

"Use the NT Convert utility from the command line, e.g. for the R: drive

Convert R: /FS:NTFS"


Will that format my new USB drive into a single partition & does that get rid of the multiple pieces on back-up which appear to be 4GB in length, 3 to back up my 12GB of data?

Thanks again, and still learning,

Steve

 

Since you have a new drive with nothing important on it you might want to consider re-formatting it as NTFS using Disk Management in Windows XP. This would be an alternative to using the convert function which sometimes can be troublesome. Be aware that changing to NTFS is a good choice but it is not compatible with Windows 9x systems. To get to the Disk Management screen go to Start > Run and enter "diskmgmt.msc" without the quotes. Press OK. Here you can partition and format the drive as NTFS. Note that returning to FAT32 is not an option with a drive of that size. Using this method you should be able to set up a single partition or additional ones if you feel that is appropriate.

Bruce

 

Convert works at the partition level - i.e. R: above would be a partition. Think of convert as a partition filesystem conversion, rather than a formatter.

No these are files and will appear exactly as they do now, except the underlying filesytem will have changed.

Note Bruce's point about compatibility which I should have mentioned, though this gradually becoming less of an issue now that Win9x is no longer supported.

F

 

You may want to read this excellent article on converting to NTFS http://aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.htm. There are some important considerations to understand before proceeding.