trueimage home 2009 rescue cd/restore problem!

Just had an awful experience with trueimage home 2009. I've been using trueimage for several years and have had to restore various computers 5 or 6 times. My backups are on firewire drives and/or usb drives so the recovery boot cd needs to install the appropriate drivers to see my spare drives.

Trueimage 9 or 10 (releases prior to trueimage 2009) worked pretty well but had some bugs that caused me to have to reboot the recovery cd multiple times for it to see all my drives. Not sure why. The drives were always powered on and not in sleep mode.

Anyway, a virus trashed my MBR (master boot record) last night and I went to restore from a Dec 22 backup. The Trueimage home 2009 cd booted and would get all the way to where it would request the destination for the restore and would hang. I tried this multiple times. Using a laptop, I engaged in a chat session with their technical support. They told me I needed a new recovery CD (different from the latest release version) and sent me a link to a new ISO image which I burned into a bootable CD and tried. Same result. The new CD had various options for starting with and without ACPI and with and without USB support. Same results. Without USB support the mouse wouldn't work and their software (linux based) doesn't support keyboard mode.

Finally, I booted my Trueimage 10 disc. It wouldn't recognize the trueimage 2009 backup format but I did have a 6 month old backup in trueimage 10 format so I loaded it.

After a 2 hour restore, the system booted and I installed trueimage 2009 and from windows, started a restore session. The windows restore creates a script which is run when the system is restarted and upon restart the system began restoring my dec 22 backup. I started it this morning before I left for work but I assume I'll be good when I get home.

SO THE QUESTION IS...

What's a good, lightweight AND RELIABLE package that handles backup/restore/MBR Recovery, includes a recovery disk option, handles multiple partitions, various file system types (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, etc) and doesn't require tons of running services monitoring file changes. (I prefer to manually perform my backups)

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

And by the way, I tried Ghost a couple years ago but it failed to support multiple bootable partitions and installs itself like a virus. Uninstalling required manually stopping services, deleting registry and startup entries, etc.

 

bump...anyone?

 

Make a BartPE or VistaPE CD with TI on it. It uses a Windows environment rather than Linux and you can also add any extra drivers that aren't within Windows.

 

Does the TI software require registry entries or can I just put the executables on it?

 

TI requires Registry entries. You need to add the plugin/script to your BartPE/VistaPE build and then create the build.

 

I did that. Downloaded the plugin/script from the acronis site. Created the bartpe iso image with the acronis image, burned to cd, booted on the machine i'm trying to restore. It worked great...Until I tried to load the backup image. Apparently the plugin is from a version pre Trueimage Home 2009 and didn't recognize my backup formats. I wonder if I can just replace the exe and dlls from my trueimage home 2009 installation?

 

The TI 2009 BartPE plugin shouldn't have a problem reading TI 2009 images. Are you sure you put the TI 2009 BartPE plugin into your BartPE build and not a TI 11 or earlier version?

 

I put the one that was linked from my login page. Maybe there is another version available? How do I see the list of TI plugins? I have purchased several versions and I guess it's not showing me the 2009 version.

 

by the way, chatted with their customer support today. They said the ti home 2009 plugin is not on their website but they gave me a private link to it which I'll try tonight I guess. I still wonder why I upgraded to tell you the truth!

 

What Ti2009 build do you have? Build 9646?

(to get the information start Ti2009 and press ALT-key. The menu appears...)

 

Not sure. I currently have restored my system from the 6 month old TI 11 backups. After restoring and installing a half dozen or so apps that I had added since then, I backed up again with TI 11 this time. Since TI-home-2009 was what caused the problems in the first place, I have not re-installed it. The backup from 6 months ago was TI 11 format.

 

Hello all,

Thank you for using Acronis True Image

jackzucker, have you validated the archive created by means of Acronis True Image Home 2009? Could you please try to validate the archive using Acronis True Image Home 2009 CD?

Thank you.

--

Oleg Lee

 

yes, i've validated the archive. The problem is not the data. The problem is that either the linux os or TI is losing track of the drive, mid-stream. Please process my refund as promised.

 

I have a more recent version even than 9646. After the initial problems, customer support gave me a more recent version that hasn't been released yet that supposedly addresses the issues. IT DOESN'T.

 

Hello jzucker,

Thank you for your interesting in Acronis True Image

If there is no chance to restore the image you can at least copy/paste all necessary information from it using Mount option within the program. You can install operating system from the scratch then mount the image and copy your data.

If you have created refund request you will surely receive it soon.

Best regards,
--
Dmitry Nikolaev