Happy Camper

I just wanted to write up a quick message to share my first "real" experience with True Image 8 Build 903.

I just bought the program about ten days ago after checking out the trial version. I was a Norton Ghost user, but there were things I didn't like about it such as the DOS-based nature of it, sub-par NTFS and Firewire drivers, poor support for USB HID devices, and lack of support for Hyperthreading and Multi-core processors.

Two days ago, a friend asked me for help with her PC which started to act funny and lock up at different times. I went over there, and determined that the hard drive was going bad. I took the PC home and started to work on it. I bought Gibson Research's Spinrite 6.0 hoping that it could recover the data from the sectors that were bad and revive the drive, but of the 22 bad sectors that it found on the 80GB drive, it couldn't recover any.

I then popped in the True Image CD that I made on my personal system days earlier and hooked up my external Firewire drive. I made a backup of the two partitions on my friend's computer, instructing True Image to ignore all read errors after the first error dialog popped up. Completing the backup took four hours.

Next, I removed the failing drive, and replaced it with a 60GB Maxtor drive that I had retired. I again booted from the True Image CD, and restored the backup I had just made. It automatically proportionally resized the two partitions to account for the smaller drive size, and restored the image in about twenty minutes. I shut the system down, disconnected the external drive, removed the CD, and hit the power switch -- the system came right up, and a subsequent disk check of both partitions found no problems with the resized NTFS file system.

Needless to say, I'm a very happy camper. After spending $89 on Spinrite and letting it mess with the drive for more than 24 hours and not getting anywhere, I was able to save my friend's system without any hassle. Had the many retries and recalibrations induced by the bad sectors not caused the backup to take so long, I'm sure I could have gotten the system backed up and restored onto a new drive in under an hour. I know from watching the Spinrite screens that much of the time was spent waiting for the drive to respond when it retried reads of the bad sectors and recalibrated, so the lengthy backup time compared to the restore is not surprising.

I'm going to recommend to my friend that she get a second drive and a copy of True Image. She uses the PC for business, so she owes it to herself to safeguard the data.

 

Hello THoff,

Thank you very much for your warm words. Our teams worked hard to create good and reliable software that works fine on many computers in the world.

Thank you.
--
Irina Shirokova

 

Gibson offers a refund (I think within 30days of purchase) if you're not happy so claim it.
I assume you have somehow recovered the data that was in those bad sectors.