Questions Concerning Slow Restore in ATI 10.

Recently, I decided that I wanted to replace my 40gb laptop hard drive with a newer 80gb Travelstar 7k100. I also have a 80gb WD USB external HDD.

So, I have ATI 10... I created an image of the 40gb HDD and stored it on the external HDD. This didn't take too long, only about 20mins.

Then I took out the old laptop HDD and inserted the new one.

Loaded the ATI bootable disc.

Went through the restore steps and let it start.

It says that it will take 12 hours for it to restore. Is this how long it normally takes? Or is there something else?

Dell Inspirion e1505
Intel Duo Core
1GB RAM

 

I would say you created the image using the Windows TI.

The behaviour you describe is not unheard of in TI. The Windows environment has good drivers for all of your hardware. The TI bootable CD is a Linux environment and its weakness is a lack of good or any drivers for some hardware. This could well cause the long restore time.

You can open an official support ticket with Acronis and they may provide you with an updated .iso image of the recovery CD with a better driver. You can also create a BartPE bootable CD containing the TI plugin which is included in your TI distribution. BartPE provides a Windows environment and also allows adding of updated and special drivers. There is an alternative from Mustang as well. Search the forum for it.

First thing might be to try the suggestion in II in the following link. Be very careful of the spelling they look similar but are indeed different.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=55317

 

tdebli1,

Are you aware that you should do a partition(s) restore with resize (plus the MBR) to use all the new drive space?

Or you could do an entire disk restore and use the resulting 40 GB of unallocated space to create an additional partition in it.

I apologize if I'm stating the obvious, but I see it's your first post here.

 

Yeah, I'm aware of that. And thanks seekforever, I will look into doing that. That sounds most likely what could be happening.

 

Do you have enough space on your hard drive to make a large enough partition for images ? If so I would suggest that you make a partition and then make images to that partition and then cut and past the images to your external drive.

I know this sounds like it might take longer but on a number of machines I have found that total time taken is less. Certainly transferring the image to your hard drive partition and then restoring will be a lot quicker.

I don't know why Acronis has such problems with external USB but until they fix the problem I would not image directly to an external unless I really had no other choice.

 

Unfortunately I don't have enough room on my current laptop HDD to store images on a separate partition.

Also, I tried II in the suggested link to no avail.

So, I will look into BartPE and open a support ticket.

Thanks for the help, all.

 

If I understand you correctly you have an existing 40 gig and a new 80 gig. You have already made your image.

so why not replace the 40 gig with the 80 gig. install Xp on a 40 gig partition a second partition to allow you to copy the image and restore from there.

messy but it won't take 20 hours

Sorry if I have misunderstood you.

 

Yeah. But I wanted to do this in a way where I didn't have to go through the process of re-installing XP.

Since, I have a dell computer, XP MCE came pre-installed. I didn't want to go through the process of obtaining the installation disk since it doesn't ship with Windows XP MCE. (Heard it's a pain to do)

I also realize that I could have bought a 2.5" USB enclosure to make it easier to just clone my drive currently in the laptop to the one I want to put in. But they make few SATA enclosures and I didn't feel like spending the $22.00 for one.

So, I figured that since I have the USB external drive, I could just make an image to there, put the new drive in the laptop, and restore the image to the new drive making it just like my old one with nothing changed.

Turns out that it's a bit more off a hassle than I thought it was going to be. It's not that I can't do it, I just don't want to wait 12+ hours for it to be done.

 

I have a similar situation, except that I am looking to create an image of the C drive (Dell 4550 desktop running XP SP2) to my Passport 120GB USB drive.

I thought I would be able to load my new hard drive, boot from the Rescue CD and then restore the TI image file from the USB drive. Perhaps I need to use the BartPE CD? Am I off base on this process?

Please correct me on this if need be. Thanks.

Regards

 

Okay...

So, I got a e-mail back from Acronis Support suggesting that I format my external USB HDD from NTFS to FAT32, and let them know the results ( which I need to do still...). Anyway, even though it was a hassle to do, I did it and tried a restore. It worked like a charm. The restore time went from being 12+ hours to around 20mins.

So, now that that is solved, other issues have risen...

Trial 1:
First, I restored the image, selecting partition C: first. I then resized it to fit the new drive. The I restored the other two partitions, making sure they were the same size and in the same relative place on the new drive as it was on the old drive. Then I restored the MBR and Track 0.

Restored it. Booted up, and a error occurs about the hal.dll .

I went to try and restore again, when I noticed that Acronis is reporting the capacity wrong. I checked the BIOS and it too reports the Capacity wrong. So, I downloaded Hitachi's feature tool, and booted it up and changed the capacity back to manufacturer's settings.

I went to re-boot just to see if would magically work since I changed the capacity. Nope. And the same problem occured again and I had to change the capacity again. This time I booted straight into Acronis.

Trial 2:
Now Acronis sees the right size. It shows may old partitions occupying ~38 gigs of it and there's ~40 gigs unallocated.

I decided maybe I should restore the partitions in the same order that they appear in the image. So, I restore this small partition, ~47MB, then the primary partition and I resize it to fit the drive, then I restore the last partition,~4.6GB. And finally clicked the MBR and Track 0 to restore.

Restore that, and it boots up, gets to the Windows Screen, then goes to a BSOD. I didn't write down what it says, but I could probably repeat it if necessary.

And once again the same problem occured with the BIOS and Acronis reporting wrong capacity. I reset again.

Trial 3:
So, I next decided to just check the restore Disk 1., instead of selecting partition by partition. I knew that if I did this, it wouldn't let me resize it. But I figured that maybe I could create a new partition in the unallocated space and merge partitions.

So, I did this, and it boots into Windows. I go to Disk Director(Trial version), however, Disk Director doesn't see the missing HDD space. So, I decide to boot into Hitachi's feature tool again, and reset the capacity. I do this and it doesn't work...Upon next boot, windows once again reports it as being ~40GB drive even though I know its 80GB.

Trial 4:
I decided to just restore the main partition. I do this. Restore it. And an error comes up about a wrong boot path, which I expected since I didn't restore the MBR. I checked the capacity and for the first time after a restore the capacity was reported correctly. So then I went back and restore the MBR, and once again get the same error(this time I assumed because the MBR says to boot from partition 2, maybe? I don't really know, not that savvy.) And now the capacity is reported wrong again.Then I try that bootable MBR fix. And it says that there is no bootable command to overwrite, or something like that.

So is the MBR causing me all the problems?

Well, anyway, that's the main gist of what's going on. Am I missing an important step? Do something blatantly wrong? Should I just suck it up and buy the ~$20 USB enclosure and clone the drive? Suggestions?

I appreciate anyone who took the time to read this, whether you can help or not. Y'all have been really helpful thus far.