Newbie Question - Restoring Drives

Hi All,

I have recently purchased TI after some nasty memory made sude I was getting virtually nothing back from my hard drive.

I have bought a new drive (SATA2) and used TI to image the new setup. I have made an image to a seperate hard drive (SATA1) and to DVD.

I want to test the image to make sure I can count on it in the future, and have a spare IDE disk on another unused (blank) machine that I can test it on.

However, the drive I have imaged is 80GB and the spare IDE drive is 20GB. The image itself is 12GB, compressed to 8GB.

Can I restore the image to a smaller drive, or does it have to be to a drive the same size or larger?

Also, it is not on a partioned drive currently. If in the future I wish to restore it to a larger drive, do I partition the drive first before restore, or can I do this from within the program?

Many thanks in advance for your experience and expertise.

Tivaron Darkov

 

part 1 -
go ahead and restore the MBR and the c: partition, from larger drive image, to the smaller one; it should work (I've done it multiple times before)

worst case scenario, it crashes, you did not lose anything.

Once restores, put the IDE drive in as the bootable drive,a nd try to boot with it.

MAKE sure on restore, that you call it an ACTIVE partition (if FAT32, not sure what it will say, but when I use NTFS, it asks me that), so that the restored imaged drive can boot up.

Nick

 

I did a full backup to hard disk, but split into 700MB chunks over 11 CD-RWs (as the machine I was going to load it on to only had a cd drive). I then burnt the lot with Nero.

I tried to restore the backup to a new machine, ran my recovery CD, put in the first cd-rw, which it knew was an archive, but prompted me to put in the last cd. I put that in and it told me it was corrupt or not a TI archive.

It verified OK in XP though. Is this a common problem with backing up to disks?

I have a backup to DVD and one to an external HD, but am a little concerned that I will not be able to restore from these if (and when) the time comes.

Any advice is appreciated.

 

Is your recovery CD the same build or later than the build that created the archive? At build 3625 the TI engine was changed such that an archive written with 3625 or later can't be read with an earlier build. 3625 and later builds can read the earlier archives though.