Some general questions

I'm a v8 user, and am looking at upgrading to v9. It seems that the "beta" period is now over and TI9 is stable enough to use. I've been loosely following this forum and the major problems seem to be a thing of the past. True

When I had an emergency and used TI8 to restore, it restored partition sizes exactly even though I bought a larger HD to replace the dead one. Norton Ghost will ask if you want to expand the partitions to fill the newer, larger drive. Will TI9 do that?

In layman's terms, what is the Secure Zone, and how is it used? I image to an external HD, and have never done anything other than run TI, name and create the image file. Should I be using this Secure Zone?

Thanks

David

 

True Image can create a special partition on your C drive for storing Image backups and calls it the Secure Zone.

In my opinion, in its day, the Secure Zone was an excellent feature. But now with large hard drives so cheap and USB ports have decent speed, the SZ is unnecessary today. Also what if your C drive becomes unbootable - the SZ will be unaccessible. Using an external drive is the better option.

As for expanding the partition during a restore, I believe that feature was available as far back as the last build of version 8, which was 937, but I may be wrong - someone else will chip in with the correct answer.

 

Hello David,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Yes, Acronis True Image 9.0 allows you to increase the size of the restored partition. As Chutsman said, this feature is available in Acronis True Image 8.0 too.

Acronis Secure Zone is a special, hidden partition for storing backups on the computer system itself. For archive security purposes, ordinary applications can’t access it. If you create a zone, it will be listed along with all partitions available for archive creation and restoration.

Please note that Acronis True Image 9.0 has the unique feature, Acronis Snap Restore which allows you to boot OS on the crashed computer before its image is completely restored, and start the work in seconds after the restoration is launched. The restoration will be continued in the background. This feature is currently available for images, being restored from Acronis Secure Zone only.

You can also find more information on how to use Acronis True Image 9.0 in the respective User's Guide.

Please visit Acronis online store to purchase Acronis True Image 9.0 Upgrade.

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

Thank you.
--
Tatyana Tsyngaeva

 

Hello David,

Further to Tatyana's reply. Yes TI 9 (and TI does allow you to resize the partitions during a "Restore" but it's not as intuative as we might think. Therefore, if upgrading to a larger, unpartitioned and unformatted, main system drive then you will need to do the following:

1. Ensure you create a "whole disk" image of the original system drive by ticking the top checkbox adjacent to the Disk Number (usually Disk 1) in the Create Backup Wizard. This allows TI to copy the MBR into the image file.
2. Swap out the old drive for the new and boot from the Acronis bootable rescue CD.
3. Restore the "whole disk" image to the new larger hard drive by again ticking the checkbox adjacent to Disk 1. As you have found out, the new drive is bootable because the MBR was restored to the new disk but it leaves you with unallocated space equal to the difference between the old and new drives.
4. Now you can do one of two things:

a. Boot from the rescue CD and carry out another restore but this time only tick the checkbox next to the C: partition. You will find that you can now drag the size slider to change the size of the partition. If you have more than one partition and also want to increase the size of that then TI will ask whether you wish to restore another partition later in the process. Choose "Yes" or "No" accordingly.

or

b. Boot from the rescue CD and use the Manage Acronis Secure Zone Wizard to create a Secure Zone (SZ) in the unallocated space (use all the space available) but do not accept the default option to also activate the Startup Recovery Manager. Once the SZ has been created use the Manage Acronis Secure Zone Wizard to "Remove" the SZ and return the disk space to your chosen partition (note that I said to the chosen "partition" not "disk").


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Regards

 

WOW...none intuitive indeed. It looks like the simplest thing is just exactly what I did. After the restore, use Partition Magic 8 to resize the partitions to fit the new drive.

Sorry Acronis. I tried to use your disk partitioning software and could not get the resize slider to work. Dunno why, it just wouldn't work. PM worked for me.

Thanks for the responses, folks!

David