Question: Test ATI recovery by restoring to 2nd HDD

I want to evaluate the trial of ATI 10 home.
Plan is to image full Disk #1, then restore to 2nd internal disk. Have 2 systems. I know of no way to see if an image recovery will actually work w/o restoring & trying to boot w/ it. Is this correct?

SYSTEM 1 - Laptop w/ Vista hm prem from Toshiba's Recovery Disk.
Plan is image disk 1, restore to empty disk 2. Then disable disk 1 thru BIOS & attempt boot from disk 2.

Under that plan,
1) will I avoid having any "Repair Vista" or other booting issues that often arise?
2) are there other reasons this procedure won't work smoothly?

SYSTEM 2 - Desktop w/ XP hm. Basically same setup. Two internal HDDs. 2nd HDD largely empty, but has some data near beginning of disk I'll have to move, assuming XP boot partition should be near beginning of disk.

Basically same plan for testing restore as w/ the laptop.

 

Hello phkhgh,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

For System 1: Actually, with just released Acronis True Image 11.0 Home there is no need for Vista repair after restoring the image. It's recommended to unassign drive letter from the target drive while in Windows, and carry the restore procedure using Acronis Bootable Rescue Media. This way Windows shouldn't assign wrong drive letter to the target drive. Please see this article for some details on that matter.

For System 1: if you want to keep the data on the second drive, you will need to restore system partition instead of whole drive (as the latter will erase the target drive prior to restoration). You will need to resize the existing partition to free some unallocated space, though.

You can find the detailed instructions on how to use Acronis True Image in the respective User's Guide.

If you have any further questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
--
Marat Setdikov

 

I'm assuming the "unassign" part will mean something when I go through the restore steps.

Holy crap!

You mean System 2? I assume this means (for testing purposes) if you do a full disk image & want to restore it to another disk to test the validity of the image, the 2nd disk must be empty or must (will) be formatted / erased before the full system restore is attempted?

Another question: Is it, or is it not generally more preferred to do the imaging & restoring outside of windows? I've read this for years, including recently from numerous advanced users.

Why, for the TRIAL VERSION (10), does it not have the ability to create an image file from the Rescue Disk? How much of a trial is that, when the product is disabled?

Thanks.

 

The quality of an image is exactly the same whether it be made within Windows or not. Making it in Windows is usually faster but the great advantage is that it can be scheduled to run or be started with a button press with no further user intervention.
Restoring whether started from Windows or from the recovery CD gives the same result. In both cases the system is booted into the Acronis/Linux recovery environment. There is another way to restore by using a Bart PE CD with TI plugin. This will make use of Windows drivers and in many cases will perform much better than the standard ways.

The trial version does not include the making of images from the CD because if it did users could carry on using TI in a somewhat crippled way without ever making a purchase of the full version.

Xpilot