Damaged hard Drive Using Acronis True Image 9.0 Home

I tried to clone a Dell Inspiron 100gb hard drive. Source drive contained 3 partitions, one 3.6 mb, one 85 gb and one 3.69 gb. After the process my 100 gb destination hard drive turned into a 57 gb hard drive. I can only find one partition on it. I tried to reinstall Windows XP but when I reached the section where you delete the existing partitions there was only one 57gb. When I go into bios setup it shows one drive of 57 gb. I tried deleting any partitions with debug but had no luck. I tried examing the drive in True Image Home with the same results, one partition with a size of 57 gb. I tried Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 but it shows the same result. I spoke with dell and they had never seen this problem before, nor have I. They are sending me a new hard drive.

Can Someone tell me how to recove the missing space?

I wanted to image the source drive from another Inspiron to take advantage of the a process dell builds into there disk drives that allows you to redo you system to factory in about 7 minutes. I this possible with Acronis and which product(s) would I need to buy to accomplish this task?

Is it possible to create an image of my system after I have done a fresh install with all software loaded so that I can restore to this state with the speed that the dell process offers?

 

Hello jayarthur,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please provide us with the more detailed information on the problem?

- Did you create an image or performed the disk cloning operation?

Please take a look at this FAQ article explaining the difference between Clone Disk and Backup approaches in detail;

- Clarify what were the source and destination hard drives exactly (vendors, sizes, types)?

- What build number of Acronis True Image 9.0 did you use?

You can find the full version name and build number by going to Help -> About... menu in the main program window;

- How did you find out that there is only one partition on your destination hard drive?

- If you did a clone. Are you able to boot from the cloned hard drive? What happened with the source disk?

- Describe actions taken before the problem appears step-by-step.

Please also create Acronis Report in the way described below:

- Download and run Acronis Report Utility;

- Select the "Create Bootable Floppy" option;

- Insert a blank floppy disk in the A: drive and proceed with creation of the bootable floppy;

- Boot the computer from this diskette and wait for report creation process to finish;

- Collect the report file from the floppy.

Please keep the hard drive having the issue connected while creating a report.

Please submit a request for technical support. Attach the report.txt file created to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will investigate the problem and try to provide you with the solution.

The answer to both your questions is yes. Acronis True Image 9.0 allows you to create an image of your entire configuration on a live system. It uses a special method of "snapshot" image creation, it doesn't store the standalone files or directories, but saves blocks of your hard drive data, saving the information about the disk/partition geometry. After the restore you will get the an exact copy of once backed up partition\disk,
you will not need to reinstall anything.

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

You may also find Acronis True Image 9.0 FAQ page helpful.

Thank you.
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Alexey Popov