Up to now I've used Acronis but having had problems setting up a new SSD with partitions I thought I'd see if I could get along with Paragon's Hard Disk Manager 15 Trial. I'd like to check the boot integrity with the advertised function and need to set up a bootable rescue USB drive but nowhere but nowhere can I find anywhere to do this... For some inexplicable reason my Win 8.1 Pro installation doesn't have a recovery area but as Acronis can set one up then Paragon surely must.. Any suggestions? Thanks. Steve
If you're in the "Full Scale Launcher" view you'll need to switch back to the "Express Mode" (button on the third row down from top of UI). In there you'll find the "Recovery Media Builder" button on the bottom right. The manual (see p.16) can be downloaded from http://www.paragon-software.com/home/manual.html I switched from Acronis to Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 Suite (upgraded from 14) and so far I'm very pleased with its abilities, especially with my Win 8.1 install on an SSD which restores properly and the partitions are properly aligned. I don't use recovery media as I simply restore the image to the SSD by attaching it to another computer using a SATA connection and running the restore from there. I find this much easier and it's very fast. You could probably do the same by moving the SSD into an inexpensive ($25) external USB3 enclosure and connecting that way. Russell