Restoring to a clean hard drive?

This is a totally noob question, but all the reading I have done has not gotten me exactly the answer I need. I bought Arconis True Image 10 Home not too long ago and completely wiped my HD clean. I did a fresh install of XP Pro and all my most needed applications. I then created a full backup of that drive (one partition for windows, one for all the programs). It was my hope that if I ran into problems later I could easily revert to that point and not have to go through a painful format/reinstall of XP.

I seem to have run into those problems now and I wanted to restore that image. When I ran True Image and recovered from that backup archive I did get all the files I had back, but nothing that had been added since was removed. I don't want this, I want the drive to be exactly the way it was when I made the image.

Do I have to format the drives first? If I do format the drive can I run the bootable media and restore from the image (on another HD) even though Windows is not installed? If Windows is not installed, will I still be able to browse to the drive the image is actually on? And finally, if I completely format the drive will True Image create the partitions for me, or do I have to create them before I run True Image, and if so do the partitions have to be exactly the same size as before, or just large enough to fit the data from the image on?

 

Restoring does NOT involve having to format your drive. You say you made an image of your windows partition and an image of a programs partition ? which partition image did you restore or did you restore both ?

I don't know if this will help but this is what I do:

(1) Partition 1 - windows and programs
(2) Partition 2 - My Documents - Data
(3) Partition 3 - empty.

I make a full image of Partition 1 to Partition 3 - so I always have a system image which can be quickly restored. I make an image of partition 2 ( every so often) of my data to external USB drives. Keeping
them separate allows me to restore my system without over writing my data.

Whenever you restore an image the first thing Acronis does is to delete the old partition and then it does restore everything as it was on the day that the image was made.

Something has obviously gone wrong - good luck

 

When you backed up your Windows and Programs partitions, did you make an image backup or a files and folders backup.


An image backup, when restored, wipes the drive and puts back only what is in the image. That is exactly what you want, and that is exactly what a TrueImage image does.

As an aside, you can't separate Window from it's programs. You can try, but there will be files from each program in the Windows folder and entries in the Registry. When you do a restore, you will want to restore both partitions together to ensure that the entries in the Windows partition for your programs are not out of sync with the Programs folder.

 

which is why it is probably better -, in my view, to have OS and programs on one partition and data on another and not to have the OS on one partition and programs on another.