Newbie: restore to new hard drive - caution?

Folks:

I am an experienced computer user, but am wary of purchasing and using Acronis True Image 10. I have 5 partitions on my main Win/XP Pro hard drive, including the C: drive where the OS resides. Applications are installed on E:.

I have a removable EIDE drive partitioned the same way. I want to backup all partitions from the main drive to the removable drive. If the main drive crashes, I will buy a different hard drive and partition the same way. Then restore from the removable drive to the new hard drive.

I tried Ghost about two years ago and fortunately called support. They said that if I did not backup to an identical drive, connected in an identical manner, I would lose data on both drives. The reason had to do with OS low-level mapping of drive sectors. (Sorry, I can not provide a more detailed description). Holy crap - it could have destroyed everything!

So the question is: can Acronis True Image 10 do what I want to do, which is backup and restore to completely different hard drives, in a manner that preserves all data and allows me to boot and run Win/XP Pro from a different restored hard drive? Without reinstalling XP Pro and all my applications?

(Apologies if this has already been answered; a search did not turn up a response to this question).

Thanks much for taking the time to respond,

Fredo

 

If the partitions in the removable drive each have sufficient space to hold what is on the C drive, then yes ... that's the whole point of the software. In fact in your situation I would use the Clone feature. And in fact with the Clone feature you do not have to pre partition the removable drive. So the only criteria for the removable is that it must be equal or greater than the size of the C drive.

 

Thanks for the response. Good stuff! So... do you know how they avoid the Ghost problem of drive corruption?

Also - and here's the last of my paranoia - are there any strange things that Win/XP PRO embeds in its installation that tie to the hard drive it is installed on?

Any way, thanks!

Fredo

 

I was wondering similar things myself. It's not just Windows - other programs embed themselves to the specific hardware and one wonders what will happen to them if an image is restored to different hardware.

Am I correct in saying that generally speaking, it seems that to get the facility to restore to a different hard-drive (which is quite likely to be necessary in the event of calamity) that True Image 10 will not even do it, but we need the older Workstation version to get the "Universal Restore" function?

Secondly, I was wondering if we restore an image of say, an original 50gb drive to a new, different, 100mb drive, will the new drive look (and work) like the original 50gb drive (i.e. will it too have a 50gb capacity), or will it have all of its 100gb available? These points are really concerning me.

 

The answer to your question is yes you can restore to a larger hard drive and use its full capacity. See this post for details Restoring to a larger hard drive.

 

Hello Fredo and Dietmar,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

We are sorry for the delayed response.

Ralphie is right that it is possible to clone to any drive of sufficient capacity. However, please notice that cloning feature is designed mainly for moving the system to a new drive. For purposes of backing up we recommend you to use backup feature – it will save data of your choice in a compressed archive, which can be placed anywhere you like.
The restoring sequence described at the link provided by thomasjk is correct. I just want to add that for purposes of restoring the data in case of system drive crash (and therefore PC becoming unbootable) you can use specially created Acronis Bootable Rescue Media, which provides most functions of Windows version of the program while booting from a removable media (i.e. CD, flash card).
When restoring to a different hard drive you may add drivers to Window prior making the image, or, in likely case of an unexpected drive crash you can install necessary drivers using Repair Window Installation mode of your Windows Installation CD. Also this post, which describes the procedure of transferring your operating system from IDE to SATA hard drives can be useful.

You can find the detailed instructions on how to use Acronis True Image 10.0 Home in the respective User's Guide.
We recommend you to download and install the free trial version of Acronis True Image 10.0 Home to see how the software works on your computer. You will be able to use the free trial version for 15 days. The only limitations of it is Acronis Bootable Rescue Media has only restore function available. The Windows version is fully functional for trial duration.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

Thank you, Marat. I appreciate your detailed response.

I have purchased the product and have taken several backups with it. I will shortly do a test restore.

Thanks again!