Cluster Size When Restoring Image

This is really for info in case anyone else is suffering.

First I have to say that TI8 is a great product, much better than Disk Image especially since they were taken over by Symantec. However it has one major failing in that it can change the Cluster Size when doing a restore.

After exploring the Forums it would seem that TI makes this change to 'optimise the disk'. Well in my case it screws up my installation because Norton Internet Security (NIS) 2004 objects to the change and, 'eats' system resources until they have disappeared in period of less than 5 minutes. (I run Win98SE on a very new installation that I am currently building up at the moment)

I have proved this by establishing a stable system with a cluster size of 8kb and then changing the size to 16kb using Partition Magic 8. As predicted NIS 2004 becomes unstable as described above. If I then change the cluster size back to 8kb NIS 2004 becomes stable again. So when I restore an image that was taken at 8kb and it gets changed to 16kB I end up with an unstable system

One could argue that this is a shortcoming with NIS 2004 and I will be asking their technical support the question but I have to say that I agree with many of the comments on the Forum i.e. an image system should be just that and it should be restored to its original state and not make changes.

Also on the forums there is a contribution on the 9th November 2004 from the Acronis support team indicating that a manual override is will be included in future versions;
I quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello all,

We do have an enhancement to make an option to set the cluster size manually. It will be included in the future versions of Acronis True Image.

Thank you.
__________________
Best regards,
Acronis Support Team

I would ask one question When will this be implemented.

A frustrated TI8 user

Geoff

 

Hello Geoff Davis,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis products (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/).

Our Development Team works on this task now and so we cannot say the precise date when we include an option to set the cluster size manually. But we will certainly implement it in Acronis True Image in the future.

Thank you.
--
Irina Shirokova