First impressions, sorry this is so long

Yes, I'm a newbie to Acronis and thus far a bit underwhelmed.

My first test and verification process was to image my FAT32 data partition to my NTFS WinXP boot partition (same drive). I copied that TIB to an existing, formatted DVD-R that already contained data. Then I ran 8.0 under WinXP and tried to restore from the DVD-R TIB. With about a minute to go, the restoration failed and trashed the FAT32 data partition. When I went into WinXP's disk manager it was showing that partition as "unallocated".

I reformatted as a FAT32 partition and then ran a restore again, only this time I used the TIB on my NTFS C:drive. The restore went without a hitch. Very fast as well for about 3.5GB of data.

Any ideas about why the restore failed from a data configured DVD-R. The DVD-R was created with Roxio drag-to-disc.

Now I'm a bit nervous about imaging and restoring the NTFS active partition. I don't see how you can clone a running OS, so I used the Acronis Linux boot disk to create multiple, 4GB TIBs of my active C:WinXP partition to the data partition mentioned above. This process was quite speedy as well. About 15GB of files created in three TIBs with normal compression.

This time I'm going to use unformatted DVD-Rs and Nero to burn and finalize data disks that I want for archiving these TIBs. Having this archive does not mean much though if I experience a trashed C:drive trying to restore from these disks. Of course I plan on keeping the hard drive copies of the TIBs in case I need them and I'll report back when and if I have the courage to try this restore operation.

In general is the use of DVD media a bit risky and something others have experienced with this product? Also, can someone confirm that creating from a running OS really works to restore that same OS?

A little followup on my plan to image the boot drive. After reading a bunch of the threads here, it would appear I need to capture the small DOS16 partition (16MB) that exists on my Dell PIV desktop as well. Someone else had to include this type of partition in order to move from a 9GB to 20GB laptop drive. Recreating TIBs now. Any thoughts or comments are appreciated.

Gary

 

I would verify the images after you create them, and then after you move them. There's some problems with corrupt images.

 

Hello Gary,

Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

We are really sorry for the inconveniences.

We regret to infor you that current version of Acronis True Image doesn't support DVD-R. Please use DVD+R, DVD+RW or DVD-RW instead.

If you create the image of the disk to restore it to another disk please create the image of the whole disk including all partitions. In this case the MBR will be backed up and you will be able to boot from the new drive after the restoration.

Acronis exclusive technology allows you to create the image of running operational system without any risk of errors. We recommend you to read the below article, as it describes how Acronis True Image works under Windows running.

http://www.acronis.com/company/inpress/2003/01-ctr-disk-imaging.html

If you have further questions please feel free to ask them.

Thank you.
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Ilya Toytman

 

Thank you for the info. I will get the appropriate DVD media. Interestingly, TIBs burned to DVD-R do pass the integrity test so I guess it is the unsupported format that causes the restore to fail.

Thanks again for the help

 

Hello alert5,

The DVD-R format is not claimed as supported only because it failed occasionally during our internal tests. It means that sometimes it can work but we cannot guarantee that it will work in any case.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Happy to report success with DVD+R media. My confidence level with TI 8.0 is now about 98%.

I repeated my initial test by creating the data partition TIB again and burning it to a blank Sony DVD+R rated at 8x. I then did a full format of the data partition XP's disk manager as FAT 32. All that remained after the format was a 16KB system file which I assume was an MBR for this part of the disk. I then rebooted prior to archiving to DVD.

Nero reported the blank DVD+R as having 4,483MB of space available. When I set up the data burn, Nero also reported that since a larger than 2GB file was involved that it would have to use UDF for the burn. Nero recognized the 8x capable disk, but I burned at 4x anyway. I did the burn and finalized the disk with a data integrity check.

I then booted the Acronis 8.0 boot CD. Swapped out the boot disk with the DVD+R disk and restored the TIB to the original (now reformatted) partition. Perfect recovery and pretty fast at around 3 minutes for reading from DVD. Very nice!

My next step is to archive the entire disk in 4,300MB chunks for storage on DVD+R. This sure beats data backup or rebuilding an XP box from scratch.

Thanks again everybody. Nice forum that I'm sure to visit often.