Afraid to Atempt Full Back-Up

Thanks seekforever for your thought. I am coming to appreciate the fact that "Documents and Settings" are or may be considered to be part of the overall operating system," as you say, and therefore "[you] don't fool around with the contents". I learned the hard way by corrupting my OS and not being able to reboot after trying to simply restore the entire Documents and settings folder with TI 9.0. (Maybe I didn't corrupt XP but was unable to re-boot after attempting full image restore [first failure], then after attempting to boot after trying to restore "documents and settings"). My mistake, somehow/someway...not TI 9.0. I am still hopeful however, that I may be able to pull-out discrete files or folders (like music or picture files/folders) and safely restore them using TI 9.0. Seems like the software is built to do that, I just have to figure ourt how to safely do it. I have moved past any future attemppt to restore the entire image .tib, as I now have reinstalled XP and most programs. I am just trying t get back data files (pics, music, .doc files etc.). I thank you for your post.

 

Joseph, easy to do. Mount your image, noting the new drive letter.
Using 'my computer', or explore, find the actual folders in the mounted image that contain your pics, or memos, etc. and drag (copy) then to the place on your C:\ drive you want.

 

Windows File and Settings Transfer Wizard may help you out.
http://aumha.org/win5/a/fast.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/crawford_november12.mspx


What I would try at this point is to Restore your original image to your extra hard drive, which may or may not work based on XP's resistance to change. Run the Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->File & Settings Transfer Wizard. Save the files to an appropriate medium (hard disk then write to a cd or USB thumb drive). Start up the new hardrive with new OS on it and rerun the Files and settings wizard again, except use the last option of Restoring those settings and files.

If no luck with that, possibly using the Acronis TI Boot Disk and Mounting the Image and then running the Files and settings transfer wizard on it might help. Try that.

Just saw Azdon's post. Probably a lot faster doing it that way.

What he means is to Install TI properly on the New machine. Following all the instructions, of course. Run TI, mounting the old image and just copying and pasting what you NEED (Data, pics, documents). Do not run any programs FROM the mounted drive letter. Just get your Files.

Chances are in Win XP, you will want to make sure that you view All File extensions so that you get what you really want. Open an Explorer window, go to Tools->Folder Options select View, scroll down to Hide Extensions for Known File Types and make sure it is Unchecked.

This should work for you as long as you have a good Hard drive with the installed OS already there. Make sure it's up to date with Windows Updates before copying too much over.