What files are needed to make a bootable DVD with the .tib file?

Having sucessfully made a back-up .tib file, I will be using Nero to make a bootable DVD.

What Acronis files are needed to add to the bootable DVD so when the DVD boots, I can run the Acronis software to restore to the hard drive from the .tib file from the DVD.

Is the TrueImage.exe file is all that is needed, or do I need to copy the files from the Acronis rescue CD that I had created?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

regards...

Roman

 

You can do this directly with TI. Select Tools->Options->Default Backup Options->Media Components

General tab options:



Here is the Advanced tab options (I have DD so that is also available to include):

 

Hi MudCrab,

Can you use this feature if you are not backing up directly to DVDs but are first saving the backup (split to fit on DVDs) to a hard disk and using Nero or other burning software to move the files to DVDs in a second step?

 

John,

I don't know how that would be possible. As far as I know, TI is just making the cd/dvd bootable with the Acronis media when the backup is made (when TI burns the cd/dvd).

I haven't tested this feature out very much since I don't backup to DVD with TI. I did several DVD tests when I first got TI, but it's been a while.

 

What you are trying to do is simple to do, if you have ISO editing software like ultraISO or something similar. Just open the boot ISO you want to fix, add the TIB files you want to be in there and resave with a different name so you won't overwrite your original. Now you will have a bootable DVD with the extra files in it that you want. Will boot up every time.
If you just do a simple transfer of files from the boot ISO to NERO with the extra TIB files and then burn them, I don't think that will boot up.

 

This is definitely worth experimenting with. A simple path to a bootable TI DVD would be nice.

 

John,

Maybe you and Joey could come up with a set of directions to do this, and post it up for us here.

For now, since I can now use the Acronis Full rescue CD to boot my machine with, I select to back up to my DVD/RW, remove the Acronis Full rescue CD, change the options to High Compression, and Verify back-up archive file (verification makes it take longer), and let Acronis back-up to a blank DVD.

With the verification this took about 35 minutes. Without verifiying the tib image file would have taken about 15 minutes.

Of course when I need to restore my drive image, I will have to go though the same process of booting to the Acronis Full rescue CD, select Full rescue, and then will have to take out the rescue CD, put in the DVD that the image was written to, and wait for the DVD to be recognized. (One thing to note, is that since I erased the hard drive and the MBR was erased also, once booted into Full rescue, the CD drive will be listed as the "C" drive, which threw me for a bit, until I double clicked on the C drive and then it showed me the image file that had been created)

Did a test on the drive recovery, it took about 11 minutes, which includes the time to verifying the backup archive located on the DVD. Takes about 5 minutes wothout the verification process. This is on an PIV 2.6 GHz PC. Am sure that older PC's will take a bit longer, and newer PC's would take less time.

What I am attempting to do is when I decide its time to erase and format my hard drive (because of so much junk on the drive,) and then re-install Windows XP home, install all critical updates, and install all the drivers, then I have a clean working version of Windows XP. This process takes takes about 2-3 hours to complete, not including installing other programs

If I have a crash, it takes a lot less time to re-install from an image file using Acronis TI 10 or Norton Ghost.

regards...

Roman

 

Have you considered the option offered by Mudcrab in his guides (link below) Acronis Bootable USB hard disk.

You could boot into Acronis recovery using the hard drive and store multiple backup archives sets on the same drive.

 

I don't normally use DVDs for backups created in TrueImage. Today I tried to create a DVD-RW disk with the TI recovery files and a backup image of a small partition. The disk was brand new out of the box.

I get Bad Media errors, Disk Full errors but no backup image. I've never had any problems with my Memorex 4X DVD DL drive and Memorex media, so this is a TI issue. I can see that the Recovery folder has been written to the DVD, and the DVD is bootable, but the backup image never gets written.

Selecting Format in TI simply repeats the error with no format occurring.

Perhaps this is why I never do this.

As far as I can tell, TI 10 is not compatible with my DVD writer.

 

Hi Grover,

I have considered backing up to a external USB hard drive. Might give that a go one day. Just prefer to back up to a DVD/R.

One thing that does work is backing up to a network drive, which is a good feature.

I had been using Norton Ghost 8, and it worked well, not so fussy as Acronis when backing up to another drive in the same system, in DOS mode. But SATA drives make it more difficult, and the new Norton Ghost does that too, but decided to give TI 10 a shot to see how it works.

regards...

Roman

 

When you DVD become multiples, being able to have all these files on the usb drive would be an asset. No need to use the DVD device at all. ...but it's your call! I particularly like being able to store multiple dates on the same drive that is also bootable into recovery.

 

Hi Grover,

I hear ya in regards to how you are backing up your hard drive. For me, just want a clean install of XP without and extra junk on the hard drive, as you well know, hard drives are easy to clutter up.

Then I can install programs as I need them. As mentioned earlier, the time consuming part is the proper way to re-install: erase hard drive, let Windows partition and format hard drive, complete the Windows installation, activate Windows product key, install critial updates, do a disk clean, the a disk defragmentation........ and they you have a clean copy of Windows ready to install the programs you only need. This is about a 3 hour process.

Backing up for a Acronis TI 10 image saved on one DVD disk, only takes 11 minutes.

A wise man once said, "if you back up your hard drive that has software issues, if and when you have to restore from your image file, those issues will still be there"

regards...

Roman

 

I tried jonyjoe's suggestion of using UltraISO. The process is really simple.
1. Create the True Image bootable cd as an .iso file
2. Make your backup Image.
3. Run UltraISO and open the cd iso file.
4. Use the Add File to add the Backup Image file to the iso compilation.
5. Save the iso file.
6. Burn the iso file to dvd. (UltraISO will also do the burning)

I used a Backup Image that was small enough to fit on one DVD so I don't know if UltraISO is smart enough to span DVDs if the Image is larger than one DVD.

 

Hi Dwn,

Does Nero do the same as UltraISO?

regards...

Roman

 

I don't think Nero allows editing an ISO file - at least in version 6. As a matter of fact I tried Nero, but I have version 6 point something and it doesn't support burning an iso file to anything other than a CD. Maybe the later version 7 might.

 

I have version 6.3.1, and cannot find anything that does an ISO image that allows the .tib file to be added.

regards...

Roman

 

OK, what happens if the .tib is multipart with the second part on a second DVD? Will TI ask for part 2?

Don't you just feel that you have to try this? OK, I'm trying to get you to do it for me. That would make it truely impressive.

 

I'll try this in a few days ... but meanwhile, I did try to see if UltraISO would span DVDs (if the Image file is larger than would fit on one dvd), and it wouldn't. At least I couldn't find anywhere in the menu to activate this feature. And when I started the burn, it immediately said that the compilation would not fit on a blank DVD.

 

That's not unreasonable. Afterall, and ISO is of a disk as far as I've ever seen, not of two or more disks.

However, once TI is running in memory, it should be able to ask for a second DVD (or CD) just as it would if you booted from the Recovery CD.

The trick is to test it.

 

OK, I decided to give this a try myself. You can't always expect others to do the heavy lifting.

1. I created the .ISO image of the bootable Recovery media within TI 10 and saved it on my Desktop.

I found a couple freeware ISO editor that should have allowed me to add a .TIB file to the bootable .ISO, but I had no luck at all. They all failed, some with very strange behavior.

I decided that the demo version of UtraISO was the thing to try next, and it is an easy and straightforward program. If you are going to do this, buy it for $30. The demo will only make ISO files that are less than 300MB.

2. I created an image of one of my USB drives which doesn't have much on it. I spit the image in TI 10 when I was into 2 parts when I created it: Part#1.tib and Part#2.tib.

3. Using UtraISO, I opened the TI bootable recovery ISO and added Part#1.tib. I then saved that new iso and burned it to a DVD-RW disk with UltraISO.

It's smarter to put the last part of the image on the bootable disk since TI always asks for the last part of a split image first, but I did it this way because a lot of people might think that part #1 should be on the bootable disk.

4. I burned Part#2.tib to a second DVD-RW disk as a standard data DVD using Easy CD/DVD Creator 6.

5. I booted from the bootable DVD, and TI 10 loaded normally. I chose the Full version of TI because I was going to restore to the USB drive.

6. I chose Restore in TI and then selected the Part#1.tib on the DVD as the source, and I selected the USB drive as the target to restore to.

7. When I clicked Proceed, TI immediately announced that Part#1.tib was not the last part of the image and asked me to put that in the DVD drive.

8. I put the second DVD with Part#2 in the drive and TI read it and asked for Part#1.tib. This is the problem with images that span more than one DVD. You have a lot of swapping to do. Here's what I had to do:

Boot from bood DVD with #1 --> #2 --> #1 --> #2 --> #1 which restored --> #2 which restored.
(Thank heavens I didn't split the backup three ways.)

9. I rebooted to Windows, and the USB drive was perfectly restored.

So, you can make bootable Recovery DVDs easily if you have UltraISO, but if the image is too large to fit on a single DVD and you have to split it (remember to make the splits smaller than 4.7 GB option because the boot files take up about 100MB on the boot DVD). You will be doing quite a bit of disk swapping. Putting the LAST part of the image on the bootable DVD will reduce the swaping by one cycle.

I'm glad I found out how to do this since it can be useful, and TI won't write images directly to my DVD burner. However, I'll normally make my images to USB drives which are much faster and can handle large images without swapping disks.

 

John, you had better luck than I did. I actually spent most of yesterday trying this. In my case I had an Image that was split into 7 pieces - 6 @ 1492mb and 1 @ 300mb. I'll assume we all know how to incorporate the recovery media with the Image file using UltraISO as explained in a previous message.

I needed three DVD+RW to hold the files and I took the precaution of putting the last file together with #1 and #2 on the dvd that had the bootable acronis files since I knew that acronis would ask for that last file first. So my dvds had these files:
Dvd#1 - Recovery media, tib#1, tib#2, tib#7 (burned with UltraISO)
Dvd#2 - tib#3, tib#4, tib#5 (these burned with Nero)
Dvd#3 - tib#6 (burned with Nero)

The destination drive was internal, but I still used Full mode when the first dvd booted, because of another problem I stated in a previous message. The restore proceded until it needed tib#3. I put that dvd in but Acronis still asked for the dvd labelled Volume 3. I reburned dvd#2 and gave it the label "Volume 3". Acronis still didn't recognize it. I knew that when Acronis burns direct to dvd, the discs have the label "Acronis Media" so I reburned dvd#2 again, and gave it that label. Still no joy. I gave up at this point, since I would never use this method anyway.

And odd thing:
When I first booted up with dvd#1, and when it was at the point to select the Image, I clicked on tib#1, thinking that acronis would see the last one there also, tib#7 and carry on happily. But no, I got the message that tib#1 was not the last one and it needed the last one. So I had to select tib#7 to get the restore going.
But here is the odd part - if I did the restore from the same tib files that I had on another internal drive and I started the restore by clicking on tib#1 then acronis had no problem with starting the restore process.

BTW, all this was done using TI9 build 3677.
BTW 2, when I couldn't get acronis to accept tib#3 on dvd#2, I looked at the hard drive to see what was restored out of tib#1 and tib#2, since acronis had actually successfully processed these two image files. To no surprise, the drive was left as all Unallocated. One would think that there would be at least the files contained in the tib#1 and tib#2 parts.

Anyway if someone else would like to pursue this to find a solution, have at it. For me, I'm sticking to keeping my Images on a hard drive and if I have to use dvds, it will be the 2-step method.

 

Check out my instructions via the embeded link titled "Creating Bootable Rescue DVD(s) prior to TI 9.0 Build 3625" in the forum sticky Product Links, FAQs & Useful Forum Threads, in particular Post #269. You may have to change the image file manual split sizes mentioned in Post #256 if the Acronis Media Components in TI 10.0 take up more room than the did for TI 9.0 (Build 3567 and later).

Regards

Menorcaman

 

That sounds almost exactly what I did exept that you used 3 DVDs and Version 9.3677.

I used TI 10, so that may make a difference.

The option to put the boot files on the backup optical media wasn't added until version 10. That could be why I was successful.

 

Hi John,

I think you will find that feature was first introduced in TI 9.0 Build 3625.

Regards

Menorcaman

 

I stand corrected. When I checked my TI 9.3854 version, I left the seection pointed at a hard drive. The Add TI components option is only displayed if you pick a removable media drive, so I didn't see it. It is there when a DVD-RW drive is selcted as the target as you said.