True Image and External Hard Drives -- Do They Work Together?

HI all,

I wanted to start this new thread to look at the issue of whether it's a good idea to try to use an external hard drive in order to make images of my entire internal hard drive VERSUS using my second internal hard drive to record the images.

I'm having trouble imaging the larger of my two internal hard drive partitions. The smaller one (12 gigs) seems to image okay on the external drive, but I've not been able to create a non-corruptible larger drive, which is 80 gigs. I've reviewed some of the posts here and I get the sense that trying to image onto an external drive can be a problem.

Is this true from your experiences? If so, what did you find that works?

I'm using a Maxtor One Touch USB external hard drive.

Thanks very much.

...Jason

 

I have an Acer Travelmate notebook and a "special build" desktop as follows:-

Notebook:
XP Home SP2 with 60Gb HDD connected via USB port to Freecom 80Gb and Lacie 80Gb HDD's.

Desktop:
XP Pro SP2 with 2 x 60Gb HDD's connected via USB port to Lacie 80Gb HDD.

Having used TI for some time I currently have V. 8.0 build 826.
I have never had a problem in imaging to any of the external HDD's but had not had the need to do a restore until last week when my notebook HDD started to play up. I replaced it with a bare 60Gb HDD and restored the image from the external USB HDD using the TI Rescue Disk. All restored perfectly for full and immediate use - Norton Internet Security, Internet, Email, Network etc .. all as though nothing had happened.
Although this was my first ever restore I have used TI as a form of storage by having images from old HDD's and other notebooks that I regularly explore for things like Powerpoint presentations, graphics etc. For me the convenience of having my notebook "connected" to the contents of two other older notebooks and my desktop connected to contents from other HDD's is invaluable.
To read this forum it would easily give the impression that there are nothing but problems, however I guess it images life itself in that we mostly hear of problems as when everything goes right nobody has anything to say!

 

I have seen no such problem on a combination of nForce2 + on-board Firewire + Maxtor OneTouch II + True Image 6.0 (#350).

 

This is an issue that has been discussed extensively. Unfortunately, there isn't any simple answer. For the imaging to an external USB 2.0 drive to work, the USB chipset on the motherboard has to work correctly as does the chipset in the external drive. If these are both NEC, there's a good chance it will work.

However, individual motherboards have problems transfering large files from one drive to another and some SATA chipsets also have problems. Add to this the problems caused by defective memory, and it's essentially impossible to state what will definitely work and what won't.

All you can do is to try it and see. My first choice would be to buy one of the external drives noted here to work or to buy one of the enclosures that has been reported to work and put a drive in it. Beyond that, it's just give it a try.

In my case, it works fine on three different computers with Intel motherboards and two different external USB 2 drives.

 

I make backup from my laptop with ...
Disk Drive TOSHIBA MK6021GAS (60 GB, 4200 RPM, Ultra-ATA/100)
To my external hard disk ...
Disk Drive WDC WD25 00JB-00GVA0 USB Device (232 GB, USB)

Works fine, although I came accross 2 problems:

When booting with the Rescue Disk you work under Linux and it seems my USB2.0 functionallity is not OK then. Result: when restoring it takes very long.

My wireless mouse also appeared not to be compatible with the Rescue Disk so I have to remove the mouse and use the touchpad.

However maybe best is to do a test: boot with your Rescue Disk and try to make an image file. If this works fine / as usual then you won't have problems restoring I suppose.

 

I probably should have said "Unix" instead of "Linux" in the text above. Well, you understand; you are not working under windows when you boot from the rescue disk and that can make a difference of course. So just try to make a backup to your external drive using the rescue disk.