Is a Maxtor One Touch II compatable?

I am planning to purchase a Maxtor One Touch II external USB/Fireware hard drive so I cam back up my complete image to a single location. Has anyone used this with True Image 8.0? In particular, if you boot from CD will True Image see this external hard drive and let me do full and partial restores to my hard drive (i.e. C?

 

Hello wchull,

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

Acronis True Image should work properly with your hard disk via both USB and FireWire. If you encounter any problems please feel free to contact our support Team via e-mail support@acronis.com.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

I have no doubt that the drive will work when connected to my system via USB while running Windows XP. My concern is whether TI can restore my bootable C drive from the Maxtor external drive if I was booting from a CD? The doc seems to say that in some cases it will and some cases it won't depending, naturally on hardware. Choosing the Maxtor over a Western Digital or a Seagate external USB drive is a matter of choice and I would prefer to purchase one that is known to work with TI booted from a CD than one that does not. Any help on this would be appreciated.

 

Any more input from anyone?

 

I use a Maxtor Onetouch 200GB drive (first edition variety); it works fine with both the Windows and boot CD True Image applications. Can't say for definite about the 'II' editions as I haven't got one to try.

 

Short version of my story: Seagate 300 GB "Pushbutton Backup" external drive works with Acronis TI and my XP Pro system.

Longer version of the story:

I was watching this thread with interest because I also needed to purchase an external hard drive to use with Acronis TI. Last night I went to Best Buy intending to purchase a 200 GB Maxtor "One Touch II". Instead, I chose a Seagate 300 GB "Pushbutton Backup" USB/Firewire drive. The Seagate had a $40 Best Buy rebate (expires 2-26-05) which swayed me to purchase it over the Maxtor. Well, that plus Seagate's claim of cooler and quieter operation and an 8 MB cache (vs. 2 MB cache for the Maxtor).

Installation of the Seagate drive was just a matter of plugging in the power cord and hooking up the USB cable. I do recommend, however, reading the the Quick Start guide at the very least because there are some caveats in there that hadn't occurred to me. I didn't bother to install Seagate's backup software and I doubt I ever will.

The Seagate comes preformatted with the FAT 32 file system so I reformated it to NTFS. I then performed an Acronis TI backup of my entire boot drive to the Seagate external drive. [As an aside, and as per other threads here, it's important to backup the entire boot drive and not just the boot partition if you want to be able to restore a bootable drive.] I then swapped the working boot drive for a test drive and performed an Acronis TI restore to the test drive from the external Seagate drive using the Acronis TI boot CD. It worked perfectly and the test drive booted XP Pro just fine -- an apparent exact mirror of my original boot drive.

I must say it is very comforting having this backup mechanism in place. Kudos to Acronis for making great backup software. Keep up the good work folks.

David O.

 

Roger that.

Hey 'David_O', what's your surname?

 

Based on David_O's experience and his head's up on the $40.00 rebate I purchased a 300 GB SeaGate instead of the Maxtor. Initially I was a bit concerned as I plugged it in, turned the drive on and upon bootup of my system it feaked out, stalled during the system post, reset my BIOS back to its defaults and my printer started printing strange characters. I shut the drive down and restarted, changed a few BIOS settings and booted to Windows XP. Once in Windows I turned the drive back on and life was good. Subsequent reboots, thus far, have been OK.

Like David_O I converted the drive from FAT32 to NTFS and successfully created my first full image. I will tell you that performing a full system backup to a 7200 RPM drive was soooooo much better than backing up to CD's. By the time I backed up to CD and verified the image it was going on 4 hours. To the SeaGate it was like a 1/2 hour. The nice thing about the SeaGate is that you can easily put it into a briefcase and off-site your backup.

Thanks to everyone that posted on this thread, especially David_O for saving my $40.00.