FD recomandable for Laptop?

As i read a lot good stuff of FD at Wilders am thinking to give that program a try. Are there some special configurations, etc. i have to take care of on a Laptop? Can i shut down 'System recovery' feature of WinXP when FD is running?

By the way FD's Evaluation download page is not compatible with Opera. Had to use IE.

 

I installed FDISR under winXPproSP2 and it worked from the beginning, the trial version and the final version, when I bought it. If your laptop meets the system requirements of FDISR, why would there a problem.
I turned Windows System Restore OFF, FDISR does a much better job inside or OUTSIDE winXPproSP2.

 

Same here and I've been using FD-ISR on my Dell E1505 laptop since I bought it in early March and on my wife's Dell 710M laptop since we bought it in late March. I do everything with FD-ISR identically on the two laptops and on the four desktops I have it installed on at home.

 

This program is awesome whether it is on a laptop or desktop.

 

Yes it is, but i had to make my partition C bigger as FD wants to store the snaphots on the boot partition. So i am thinking an image software could suite me better, as i need the most space on the second partition for all my documente etc.

 

Ah, well, yes that is where the rubber meets the road as far as the difference between a desktop and laptop isn't it? I got extra capacity hard drives on our laptops specifically so I could have one or two FD-ISR snapshots in addition to the working one. I guess that reveals what a hard core FD-ISR fan I am.

Actually, I do rely more on archiving snapshots to an external drive more with the laptops than with my desktops, so that's a difference I failed to point out. I keep a WD Passport 120 GB drive with me on the road as I am now with my laptop to hold a snapshot archive or two and a full image made with Image for Windows. The snapshot archive is refreshed hourly as I work through the day and I redo the IFW image once every two or three days.

I actually have some bare bones WinXP snapshots on board the laptop system drive that I'm using for beta testing at the moment.

 

Let me ask one question and give one suggestion. Why partition, as it's rarely necessary. My advice is to rely on Image for Windows/DOS by Terabyte Unlimited for all of your imaging needs.

 

After testing various kind of backup/image soft i think you are right and i am going to stick with IFW/IFD.

Last question for IFW/IFD. If i store the image done by IFW in a subfolder with names longer than 8 letters is IFD capable to restore from this image in case i have to restore from a Boot IFD CD?

 

Yes. You just have to be prepared to pick the correct files for restore because your names will be truncated to 6 characters plus a tilde (~) and a number.

 

Can't test it myself in the moment. My second computer is in the moment totaly disarmed.
Tell me your result please. Extracting only some files work under Windows. Question is full restore of the partition with IFD Boot-CD from a folder like D:\test today\image\test_12345678.img

 

My results are posted above.

 

It's early, just having breakfast

 

Hehe...Not that early! I'm in Houston working, you must be an hour ahead of us and have the day off!

ETA: Oh my ! I just checked and you're 3 hours ahead of us !

 

Yes i am a German from Munic, but i am living in Buenos Aires in the moment. Local time 11:42 hours.

 

That is correct, and when you open the CMD console under Windows and browse to the file with long name you can see the 8.3 name when you type

Code:

dir /x

http://www.geocities.com/wilbertnl/images/dirx.png

 

Is it right that IFD/IFD also makes a backup from the MBR, even if it is only one partiton and not the whole harddrive i want to backup?

 

If an image backup software wasn't able to do this, I would ditch it from the beginning.
I always restore my system partition [C:] from an external USB 2.0 harddisk [E:] with several folders and I don't use DVD/CD's, because I don't trust them. I never had a harddisk crash, but I had several CD crashes.

If you want reliability, you have to eliminate as much as possible that could go wrong. I do my backups and restores in good circumstances and I do my restores without fear, because I did it so many times even without reason.
My first restores were real thrillers, but not anymore, it's routine now.
If my image backup ever fails and it will one day, I still have my archived FDISR-snapshots as a second backup.

 

Sorry to repeat my question, but is it right that IFD/IFD also makes a backup from the MBR, even if it is only one partiton and not the whole harddrive i want to backup?

 

Oops. Sorry, I missed that. The answer, Tommy is NO. Follow the link in this post of Longboard's: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showpost.php?p=809965&postcount=105? and then click next to get the reply that was given. IFW/IFW only copies partitions, NOT MBRs.

IFD will detect when an MBR is missing and install a "standard" MBR automatically if it is, as it would be on a new drive. With this approach, if you have a custom MBR as you would with FD-ISR or BING or any number of other programs that modify the MBR, IFD will not mess with it and install a standard MBR over it but leave whatever's there alone. It doesn't look critically at the MBR, just detects if something is there or not.

ATI used to have the problem of not backing up the MBR unless you backed up the entire drive, but that problem was been fixed from Build 3567 forward. For a user who knows what they're doing and has no problem restoring a standard or even custom MBR on their own, this earlier flaw of ATI's was not a disaster. But for noobs, it was a disaster many times as posted in the ATI forum. ATI would have been better off following the same strategy that IFD did.

 

Thanks crofftk, explaines all and as in my case i have a standard MBR i don't need to backup the MBR.

Result of all my testings and advices of Wilders-Folks so far:
After some more further testings and experiences with the Terabyte product it seams i will stick with those. Little and they do what they are supposed to do. Seams the best solution for my Laptop. Only dessicion i have to make is between BootIt or IFW/IFD.