First Time User Question -

I have one 120GB hard drive on my laptop. I used Acronis True Image to make an image of my hd, which is 83GB in size. I transfered the image to another hard drive on another machine. I'm looking to re-format the laptop with 2 partitions, one 90Gb and then whatever the remaining is. Under the 90GB partition, if I try to recover the 83GB image will it keep all my original settings?

Or, in general, when you recover a Acronis image, does it keep the same desktop background and desktop icons as before?



Thanks,

Sean

 

Look first at the used space on the hard drive (not the image size, since that is compressed). My guess is that the used space is more than 90 Gb. To partition, unless you have other reasons for reformatting, I would use Partition Magic to do so. It will do this without interferring with what you already have on the drive.

The Recovery of an Acronis Image will give you your original desktop and icons.

 

Actually I selected no compression, so it should be just 83Gb uncompressed. The 83Gb image is XP Pro, I was going to tinker with Vista and do a dual boot on the 120Gb drive, allocating enough space for the 83Gb image of XP pro and then the remaining for Vista. Do you think this would work?

 

It should ... but if you add anything at all to the XP part, you might soon run out of space especially if you use Automatic Restore.

 

I would think it would work, but note that the 83GB is smaller than the restored image. TI does not save the swap file or hibernation file. This can add 2 to 4 GB to the size (depending on how much memory) after restore. That may only leave you with 3 GB or so of free space. Is that enough?

You Vista partition would probably be in the low 20GB range (what's left after the 90GB partition). That is kind of small. Vista will eat up 10+GB in nothing flat so you wan't have much room to install other programs.

Also be aware that Vista will install its boot loader in the XP partition.

 

Hmm... that's a good point. I didn't think about the swap. Let's say I reformat to 2 new partitions as designed for XP (the 83Gb image) and the rest for Vista. Would I recover the image first and then install Vista? If so, how would you recover an image if it's a raw drive?

 

For a "never-been-formatted" drive, the Acronis bootable Rescue cd (and the installed software) has the "add new drive" feature which will take care of that.

 

If I do not have the bootable CD can I create a rescue CD through Acronis?

 

Make sure to download the latest build, 4940, if you're using it with Vista. Then, after you install TI, you can create the rescue cd.

 

That is what most people do ... install the software then create the Rescue CD from the menu. I think you can also find that feature from Start/Programs/Acronis True Image.

 

One last question, I'm running the CD, and there's 3 options: running Acronis True Image (safe), AcronisTrue Image (full), or Acronis Bootable Agent (full). if i were to load a hd image onto a raw drive, which of the 3 would i choose?

 

For a raw drive you would first have to use the "add new drive" feature. This is also on the bootable cd. Then if the Image is on a usb drive you have to use the Full version of TI since this supports most usb drives.

 

Let's say the image is actually over a network on another computer's drive, I don't know if it's possible to sign an IP to the machine with 1 raw drive.

 

Sorry, I don't know how TI handles network drives.

 

If you boot from the rescue cd and TI recognizes your network card it will automatically assign an address if there is a DHCP server on the network. Otherwise, you have to go into settings to set it up manually.

Then you just browse to the shared network drive with the backup image and restore it.

I've done this quite a few times on my laptop, it works fine, though not as fast as USB 2.0.

 

That sounds promising, I'll give a shot!