Does Resizing a Partition render the Image Useless?

i have a 20gig partition with Win XP on it, i made an (acronis true) image of it to restore to if/when i get in trouble.

Now I want to resize the partition with Partition Magic to 10gigs. Will this render my previous image useless?


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Another quick question:
If I move an image (.tib) that I have saved on the hard drive to a dvd+r (by burning it to to the dvd) does that effect the image or make the image not usable in any way?

Thank you!

 

When you restore a partition you have the option to specify a size diff than the original source drive. You can specify whatever you want so long as all of the data will fit. If your 100GB drive had 5GB used and you backed it up. You could restore to a partition of about 5GB

Disk backups/restore always work with the parititions sized as is, so if you backup a disk with one 100GB partition and you restore the disk, it wouldhave to be onto a disk where the 100GB partition would fit.

 

I'm sorry but you confused me.

It sounds like you are saying one thing in your first paragraph and then saying the opposite in your second paragraph.

It could just be me, its 3am here. But pls clarify.

And also - the question about burning to a DVD?
And also - i just checked and noticed the option to resize the partition (never noticed before because never had to restore to different sized partition), but is it better to do it beforehand with Partition Magic? If i do it this way, can I still use the original image of the 20gig partition?

original size of partition: 20 gigs
desired size: 10 gigs
used space: 5 gigs
acronis image: 5 gigs of data on 20 gig partition
question: possible to restore to image if i adjust partition to 10gigs with Partition Magic?

sorry its late, trying to be clear as possible in this state....now....must....sleeeeep....
ZZZzzzzZZzzzZZzzzz

 

I think shieber is talking about a disk clone in his second paragraph

Some users always burn the image to a DVD, a .tib file is just like any other file you can copy it to wherever you wish. Just be aware that restoring from a DVD is slower than from a hard drive and if the image won't fit on 1 DVD there is no way you can split it now, search for problems about restoring from DVD on this forum.

When restoring TI wil format the disk or partition, so it will be a waste of time using Partition Magic first.

As long as you resize the partition during the restore to 1 or 2 gig more than the used space on the original partition it won't matter what size you choose.

Having read your first post again, I think you may be asking that if you resize the partition from 20 to 10 gigs with Partition Magic, will the image you have already made be able to restore the new 10 gig partition in the future. I have never tried this and wouldn't do so, unless Acronis Support or someone who has clarifies it. I would always make a new image.

 

TI allows you to resize the partition when restoring but the obvious restriction is that the data must fit into the new partition size. However, I would always make a new image after doing anything like resizing with PM.

As was said you can burn an image tib file to a DVD. Always either use the burners "verify after burning option" or TI's Validate option on the DVD copy. The image file must fit on the DVD and when making new images this can be done by setting the Split size in the options. I always have my images split so they fit on DVDs just in case. On the other side of the coin, I only consider a DVD a third level backup (after second internal HD and USB drive) and if I ever had to restore I would copy the DVDs to a HD first. Any image that spans 3 DVDs or more will drive you nuts shuffling the DVDs during the restore since TI does not restore one DVD, then the next, etc.

 

Restoring a larger partition onto a smaller partition is allowable, BUT, everytime I did it that way with windows xp the drive letters on the restored drive changed (even when I removed the original drive first before rebooting.)

Maybe it won't affect you, but if when you boot up the restored drive and it hangs at the logon screen, you probably have drive letter change problems. But that's easily fixable. You can restore your 20gb image (5gb use ) into any size partition over 6gb(with possible drive letter change problems), but just as a side note if you restore to a partition over 21gb you probably won't have any drive letter change problems.

My observations are from actual restorations I've done on several computers with windows xp. I'm giving you the worst case scenario that you might encounter but even with drive letter change problems I would still restore to a smaller partition as long as I know how to fix the problem afterwards.

As far as saving TIB's to dvd, if you want the TIB to remain as accurate as possible and to be readable during restoration, you MUST use only the very best blank dvd media (verbatim or sony). 90 percent of the problems with dvd's not being able to be read back accurately or quickly is low quality media. My system partition 21gb(6gb in use) easily fits into 1 blank dvd when compressed (normal setting) and using quality media I have never had any problem restoring it back to a hard drive. (it usually takes about 15 minutes to restore using a dvd backup versus about 5 minutes using an external drive backup.)

 

I'm curious as to why this happens to you when, in general, it does not happen for most users. Could you describe the partition layout on your disk or post a screen shot from Disk Management Console?

For example:

[C: 40 GB primary active NTFS] [D: 40 GB logical NTFS] [E: 20 GB logical NTFS]

Maybe we can figure out why you are having this problem.

 

Believe it or not, even after all that good information, I am still confused.

Let me try to explain my situation a little better and more specifically.

I got a laptop some months ago and the first thing I did was wipe the 60gig drive and create 2 partitions, one (20gigs- C) for the OS which is WinXP, and one (40gigs- E) for data storage. (The D: drive is the cd-rom).
Then I installed WinXP and all the drivers for the hardware and all the windows updates to the C: partition.
Then I made an image of the C: partition with TI and saved it to the E: partition. I wanted a clean image of the OS with all drivers and updates installed but with none of my personal programs yet so that if I want to sell it in the future, I dont have to wipe the drive and re-install everything again, i can just restore to the 'SELL' image and then format only the data partition.
After that I installed all my personal programs and made another image. That would be 'MY' image to restore to if I got in trouble.
Since then I also made 3 more images (5 total) after I had made certain setting changes and/or added programs, etc. Number 5 being the most recent image.

Now I realize that I dont use 20 gigs for the OS partition and its a waste of space. I want to reduce it to 10gigs. But I am afraid that by doing this I will render all my images that I created before useless.

So theres my dilemma, if it was you, how would you handle it?
I have thought that maybe I should just restore the partition to the very first 'SELL' image and then afterwards resize the partition down to 10gigs, and then save a new image. Then re-install my personal programs/settings, etc., and then save another new image. But i was looking for an easier way.

 

eb001:

There is no problem getting TI to do what you want. You can use your already existing images in the future; they will not be rendered useless by resizing your partitions. You do not need to reinstall your software or make new images to get your desired outcome. My vote is to go ahead with your plan.

Here's a little more in the way of an explanation. When you restore a TI image you get to choose how the partitions are restored:

1. Restore the entire disk (by checking the box next to the disk, which selects the entire disk and all partitions)-- this will put things back the way they were at the time the image was created. The C: partition will end up being 20 GB and the E: partition will end up being 40 GB in your example.

2. Restore partitions one at a time (by checking the box for only one partition at a time and stepping through the screens in the restore wizard)-- TI will allow you to choose the size of each partition. You can choose to restore an old image of your C: drive (taken when the partition size was 20 GB) to a disk with an existing partition size of 10 GB (providing that there was 10 GB or less of data in the partition). Similarly, you can restore an image of your E: partition (taken when the partition size was 40 GB) to an existing 50 GB partition. You just tell the restore wizard how much space to use when restoring each partition.

Apparently you want to do #2. TI will allow you to do that.

 

k0lo....

i dont want to do number 2, i never took any images of the E(data) partition, and i never took an image of the whole drive either.

only took images of C partition and saved them to E with the rest of my data.

 

OK; no problem. Then you may restore your already-existing images of the C: partition at a later date, even if you've resized the C: partition.

 

No. You can restore a partition and tell ATI to resize the partition-- but the size has to be big enough to fit all the data in the backup.

 

I would buy a external hard drive to keep your images on, even if you only copy them from the second partition. If your one and only hard drive dies your images will die with it.

 

Sorry got it wrong

 

I also confused the person I had given the response to.

Your explanations were better than mine. Thanks,
sh

 

You guys are re-defining my perception of a restore image.
I was under the impression that an image of a hard drive can only be used to restore that particular hard drive, therefore if the drive crashes, the image would be useless anyway because you cant use it for any other drive.

I was also under the impression that an image is exactly that, an image of the partition, including the unwritten sectors, and therefore if you restore to a different sized partition, it wont take, because the space to be written to (destination partition) has to match exactly the how the sectors were written in the source image.

 

I see why you have been confused by the responses to your question. You have been operating under some faulty assumptions.

One of the main purposes of creating an image is so that it can be restored to a new hard drive upon failure of an existing hard drive. Drive failure is, unfortunately, a rather common occurrence. If you could only restore an image to the same hard drive then the program would be of limited value.

For your second point, compare the size of one of your image files to the size of the original partition. It's a lot smaller, isn't it? TI only backs up in-use sectors and skips backing up the Windows paging and hibernation files (since these two files can be simply recreated as empty files of the same size upon restoration). This, along with using compression, makes the size of the image file a lot smaller than the size of the partition. A TI image is not a mirror copy of the partition; it does not include unwritten sectors and therefore can easily be restored to a different-size destination partition.

Having said that, there is a special mode in TI 11 that allows making a complete copy of every sector in a partition, but you have to explicitly choose this special mode. Normally, the algorithm in the previous paragraph is used when creating an image.

 

Selecting a Location to Restore to


You may restore data to its initial location, to another disk/partition or to an unallocated space. The target partition should be at least the same size as the uncompressed archive data.

From Help menu of ATI.

 

Thank you.

 

I suggest you read GroverH's beginners guides here and if you haven't already done so download and read the users guide available from the Acronis website