Couple of question about TI

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by bob733, Nov 22, 2008.

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  1. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    I had a major problem and had to completly rebuild my Vista 64 bit system. In short the images I had previously created with another program did not work.

    Hence, I purchased Disk Director and am I am also doing a 15 day trial on True Image Home (is there another version and is it worth getting?). That was Q1.

    Q2. Is there anything special I have to do if I want a complete image of my C partition (containing the Vista 64 OS and Programs)? For example, I saw stuff about system State and so forth. What do I have to do to completly protect myself in the event I have to restore and save my OS partition?

    Q3. As the images (created with another program) failed previously, is there anyway I can try the Acronis Image I created to assure it is going to work. Or, do I just have to "keep the faith" and hope it will work in the event I need it?

    thanks in advance.

    Bob
     
  2. mranybody

    mranybody Registered Member

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    Hi Bob,

    Q1:True Image Home 2009 would be the what you need I think. But saying that I've never used Disk Director though.

    Q2: Do full images of all partitions. System State is not the full image. Create your images through the 'My Computer' option in ATIv2009 on a schedule. This is what you need to completely protect yourself. Along with creating a bootable media if you didn't buy the boxed version. This can be done through options > Create Bootable Media. Boxed version is bootable.

    Q3; You can include image validation to be included during the image creation. You can do this with all image and backup tasks to insure they are valid once done.

    Hope that's helpful. You can download the complete user manual from Acronis if you want to read through. It's very comprehensive.
     
  3. mranybody

    mranybody Registered Member

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    Oh And welcome to the forum, Bob. From my own experience I can safely say that there's So many helpful people here.
     
  4. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    thanks for the answers.

    But, do I have to back up all the partitons? For example, on my Raptor HD, I have a C partition (VISTA and programs), and a D partition (Data).

    I back up the D (Data) partition using another program. It is only the C partition (Vista and programs) I want to protect.

    If something failed, I would want to restore (I created a TI and DD rescue disk) it using the rescue disk and the tib file (which just contains the C partition). I would restore the D partition (Data) with the other program.
    Also, I noticed that the partition I was backing up (50 gb) only created a 7gb tib file. It looks as if it is not a true imagea (which would include free space), but rather, it backs up on sectors that contain data (of any kind).

    Bob
     
  5. GroverH

    GroverH Registered Member

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    Bob733,
    If you have the time, you might want to read my guides listed on line 2 and 3 of my signature.

    As for the types of backup, it is full backup (disk option checked) which includes all partitions on the system disk which will help you the most should you need to replace your disk or restore your current system.


    Clone or Restore using Resize comparison
    https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=1299861&postcount=9
     
  6. Doug_B

    Doug_B Registered Member

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    Q3: There is no substitute for doing an actual restore on your own system to verify the functionality. Get yourself a spare hard disk for this. As you've already lived through the problems of the previous application, you should have even more motivation to be sure in advance of when disaster strikes. As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you...

    Doug
     
  7. dwalby

    dwalby Registered Member

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    Agree completely. What you're buying with a disk imaging product is the convenience of restoring your system at any time, which under certain circumstances is priceless. With disk drives so cheap these days, and more than enough ways to fill them up with pictures, video, etc. its just a matter of time before you have to buy a spare or larger disk anyway.

    Verify your restore process works 100% before going any further, otherwise you may just be wasting your time with your current backups. Finding out something is broken later on when you really need to rely on the tool is foolish IMO.
     
  8. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    Grover, i read your guides and thanks a lot. I did a full disk copy (C: primary partition and D: logical partition) but for the life of me, I dont see how that would make a restore safer (if I only wanted to restore the C partition).

    But, I will take your word for it.

    I did make a cd for disaster, but when I booted from it, it booted ok untill at the very end, the mouse froze and the keyboard didnt work. I had to power down. I suspect it is something with my system but I am still looking for the cause now.

    Any thoughts there will be appreciated.

    Anyway, thanks for the great help from all or ya!

    Bob
     
  9. GroverH

    GroverH Registered Member

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    The point I was attempting to make is having a full disk backup makes restoring to a new disk much easier because you have all the pieces and Windows will boot. A lot depends upon your configurations. For those that have recovery or diagnostic partitions as the first partition, their restore of C only from a backup of C only would not create an identical replacement.

    Have a full disk backup does not mean you cannot restore your single partition overtop of itself should you have a need. However, if you should need to move to a larger drive, you would have fewer issues using a full disk backup.

    Try creating a new Rescue CD but use the iso option. See if that helps. Or, if you have an extra flash drive, have TI make that bootable--all from the same menu you used to create the single rescue CD. If all of those fail, perhaps others or Acronis can offer some alternatives.
     
  10. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    well, thanks again... I was able to create a rescue disk by tool recreating it againo_Oo_O the Iso option did not allow me to specifiy a target (RW CD), so I tried the original way again, booted and this time the mouse worked. OOLLM (One Of Life's Little Mysteries).

    However, a bigger problem seems to have surfaced (see attachments). I did a full disk TI of my internal 160gb HD to an external USB 500 gb Maxtor HD. Now, I can not access the Maxtor HD!. I get the messages : Location is not available. O:\ is not accessible. Access is denied.

    I ran Acronis Disk Doctor and it shows all the HD (including the Maxtor). It shows the maxtor as 465.8gb and free space of 80+gb. But Windows explorer on two systems gets the same error message (above). If I re-plug it in (to a USB), different things happen. This time, I get a message Failed to read fromt the Sector63 of the Hard disk (see attacement). Retry just got the same error message. Clicking Ignore just got the same error message but another sector as being bad. So, I just Clicked Ignore all to let it finish. One time I plugged it in, it showed the 456 gb primary but 962 bg unallocated.

    I took it to another system with the same (location is unavailable message).
    I wonder if my TI backup of the C and D partitions to the Maxtor hozed it? And more importantly, is there a way to back out of this?

    This Maxtor is my primary backup drive and it does not look good right now.

    I hope the gurus of Disk Doctor and True Image can help this new owner of the Acronis Disk Doctor and was about to be new owner of the True Image product.... but now, I really do not know... so any help would really go along way in restoring my confidence in these products.

    I really appreciate the support here guys (and gals if any).

    Bob
     

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  11. dwalby

    dwalby Registered Member

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    The red "C" in the upper left corner of the 500GB disk indicates it is corrupted, which may be the root cause of your error messages.

    I'd try a chkdsk and reformat that partition, then if the drive checks out OK, backup your Vista partition to it once again.
     
  12. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    if I go under disk management, my 500gb hd increased to over 1 TB! It shows 456 gb as primary and then 920 gb as unallocated.

    does Disk Director have a chkdsk function. If not, do I run it from Command prompt within windows (syntax chkdsk /f O:)??

    If I reformat the partition, I lose tons and tons of data....

    Any suggestions?

    Help?
     
    Last edited: Nov 24, 2008
  13. dwalby

    dwalby Registered Member

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    Bob, it appears you have a couple of issues to solve. Considering how much data you have on the 500GB disk you may need to get a hold of some disk data recovery s/w to salvage any data you can from that drive. Don't try to use it anymore for backup purposes until you can get the corruption issue straightened out.

    You can still verify your Vista backup/recovery using the other two drives. But don't try to recover over the original Vista partition, create a new partition on the other drive that's large enough to hold the restored Vista partition. The unallocated area at the end of the disk is big enough, create a new partition there with disk director, lets call it Q: for now.

    Next, image the Vista partition to the D: partition. Then use the recovery CD to restore the Vista image to Q:. Then remove both drives and put the drive with Q: in the first position, and leave the other drive out. Boot using the Disk Director recovery CD and set the Q: partition as active (I don't know if you will have to rename it C: before booting, or if you can leave it Q: and boot from it). Then remove the recovery CD and try to boot into Vista from the Q: partition. If your backup/restore process went well it should boot right up. If it doesn't, then you haven't disturbed any of your original data in the process.

    The other option is to copy all your current data from the second drive over into the D: partition, then you'd have the entire second drive free to use to try to restore your Vista partition.

    Sorry to hear you're having so much trouble, the whole process isn't all that complicated if your hardware co-operates.
     
  14. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    Right now, I am running a Disk Director check on the USB drive. I have been using this HD for a year with no problems, and now, after using it once for a TI backup, it went from a 500 gb drive to an over 1TB dirive!

    I just find it extremly difficult to think the HD just crashed without the influence of TI or Disk Director. All I did was a disk back up of my 160 gb raptor internal drive to the external drive....

    The Disk Director Check is still running going through a lot of delete sectors, replacing orphans etc etc, and now, it is doing the ChkDsk part. this will run a while.

    But I saw so many delete sectors going on that I am afraid to look at the carnage once the CHKDSK is done.

    The best case would be if the Primary portion (the 465.8 gb) is still somehow intact, I can copy it to another large drive, and then reformat/resize this bad one to 500 gb and make the 950.2 gb unallocated space go away.

    I hope the Vendor reads this forum and can somehow offer a suggestion on how a hD increases in size, when I did absolutly no resizing!

    Bob
     
  15. dwalby

    dwalby Registered Member

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    With disk director you can go into the editor mode and see what's in the partition table. that would probably explain the weird partition sizes you're seeing.

    Click on the leftmost part of the partition graphic (the one that selects the entire disk) and then click on 'edit'. I think one of the options is 'partition table' and you can also choose 'hex' as the display mode from the pulldown and see the actual data bytes in the table. (I'm on a work PC now and don't have DD in front of me so I may be slightly off on the exact commands, but you should be able to find them)

    Agree its very suspicious that you started having this problem as soon as you did the backup image, but have no idea how that process could have affected the partition table.
     
  16. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    you know, I come out of many many years of IT (25 plus). There is one thing that possibly could have made TI burp.

    I noticed that when I did my first TI image, the file was not as big as the physical space it was backing up.

    So, I had to back up my Raptor (C and D). the C had only 25 some odd gig of programs and op system, while the D partition was totally vacant (nothing in there at all).

    Using the Assume (Ass U Me) logic, I decided to back up the 160 Raptors's C and D partitions (containg only 25 gig for both partitions combined) onto the External 500 gb drive (with over 90 gb of free space).

    I know, I know... your are asking "why are you backing up a 160 gb Raptor to a external with only 90gb free). Two reasons. 1st), I figured it was only going to use a max of 25 gb because that is all the data and programs on the Raptor I had. and 2), if TI did not have enough room, TI would be smart enough to tell me and abend (Old time computer speak for Abnormal End (of job)).

    And yet, I wound up having a 500 gb drive get pregnant and go to over a Terabyte in size! Could it be that TI has a Program Bug (heaven forbid)? (ie., backing up a larger area to a smaller area ,when the larger area is not all data but has a lot of free space)?

    Bob
     
  17. dwalby

    dwalby Registered Member

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    What you did was perfectly normal and your assumptions were correct, IF you are not using the sector-by-sector option. The normal imaging will only record the actual used data, and will compress it as well. So its not uncommon to have a .tib file that's about half the size of the actual used data block you're imaging. Given that, you had plenty of room on the disk according to your description.

    Now, the fact that you backed up an empty partition seems like a possible corner case that isn't often tested. After all, why would anyone backup a partition with nothing on it? Those are the kinds of scenarios that often get left out of test plans in a rush to get a product to market. Maybe they tested it with a single empty partition, but not with a populated partition PLUS an empty one. Whatever the cause, its water under the bridge now unfortunately.
     
  18. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    Unfortunetly, I am left with an external usb hd that has doubled in capictiy, is corrupt and almost to the point, I might try some data recover software.

    In my opinion, this was a bug with True Image. Although I am on the trial period, I did purchase Disk Director which has been of no value in recovering from this disaster.

    Do you think Acronis would stand behind their product and try to help me if I ask them to review this thread, and if not, do you think they would refund my purchase (49 bucks) for Disk Director.

    I hate to give up on something like this, so I will wait and see if they will help.

    Certainly, as a professional, I have gone out on the limb many times to help people correct IT problems... maybe they will also.

    Bob
     
  19. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    Bob:

    Your external disk did not double in size; that's an artifact of how Windows Disk Management views disks with partition table problems. The correct size should be displayed in Disk Director.

    Would you be willing to do what Doug suggested in post #15 and post a picture of the external disk's partition table? Use the View menu choice "As partition table" and make sure that you drag the window borders out until you can see all of the entries in the table. Make a screen shot and post the result back here and maybe one of us can figure out what went wrong.
     
  20. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    appreciate the help when I click on Windows Exploere for the external drive I am still getting the location is not available messagtes.
     

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  21. dwalby

    dwalby Registered Member

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    Bob, now your 500GB drive is no longer showing up as corrupt, and in DD at least its size is what you'd expect. Its only showing about 100G or so of actual data though, so that might not be what you were expecting. I didn't look at the partition info too closely because it appears to be working now (albeit minus a fair amount of your original data perhaps). I'll post this and take a closer look after the post.
     
  22. dwalby

    dwalby Registered Member

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    Bob, go up into the view tab and select 'partition table' from the pulldown menu, you're currently showing NTFS boot sector mode.
     
  23. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    dwalby,'
    'Hmmmm clicking on View, there is no partition view you mentioned... still looking for it however

    And as tol the data that was on the Maxtor.... close to 400 gig
     
  24. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

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    To view the Partition Table:
    • Start DD and select Manual Mode (View >> Manual Mode)
    • Right-click on the Disk # for the drive you want
    • Select Advanced and then Edit from the pop-up menus
    • In the Disk Editor, select the View menu and then As Partition Table
    viewpartitiontable1.jpg
    viewpartitiontable.jpg

    A screenshot of what Disk Management shows might also be helpful.
     
  25. bob733

    bob733 Registered Member

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    Here you go... and as always, appreciate the help
     

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