Help with Restore

Hello,

I had two fairly small hard drives in an older PC and decided that it would run faster with one much larger drive. I bought Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1 and did a full image backup of the two hard drives. I replaced the two drives with one much larger one and am having extreme difficulties restoring my image from the two drives to the single drive. It wants to delete existing partitions to install from disk 1 before restoring disk 2 and the same if I reverse the order.

What can I do to restore my disk image to the single drive? Nothing I have tried seems to work. Would anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks, Steve

 

You need to restore only the disk that was the booting disk in the old system. Then you can copy over the files from the other disk.

 

You can't merge the backups from the two drives in to one. I personally find it far better to just do full backups every time.

 

You might try to partition your larger drive into 2 partitions, and restore each backup image on it's seperate partition.
Just make sure you restore your system partition first.
If you are trying to restore windows xp, you might have drive letter change problems following the restore, but thats easy to fix.

 

Hello and thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, that won't work because each of the two drives had three separate partitions, e.g. Disk 0 had C (FAT32), H (NTFS) and E (NTFS) and Disk 1 had D (FAT32), F (NTFS) and G (NTFS). My windows xp was on the G drive. Now do you see the problem? When I try to restore Disk 0, it wants to delete any partitions already created or if I do Disk 1 first, when I try to restore Disk 0 it wants to delete the existing partitions that have been restored. It is a complex problem and I don't see a solution.

Thanks,

Steve

 

Is the problem you are trying to restore whole disks, ie, Disk0 or Disk1, rather than individual partitions?
You should be able to restore the individual partitions without interfering with the existing ones.

I would delete any partitions on the "new, large" disk to get rid of anything on it.
Next, I would restore my Windows partition and do what is necessary, if anything, to make it boot.
Then restore the other partitions as required.

 

Yes, that could be the problem. I was trying to restore the entire disk, one at a time. However, it might be better to repartition it the way I want it and restore only what I need.

Thanks,

Steve

 

That's what I do. My method isn't the fastest but it always works.

When I get a new HD:
I boot up the XP install disk and setup the OS/Apps partition and format it. This is the slow format. This formatting step is not required but it gives me confidence the new disk is working properly. I then stop the setup when it wants to copy the Windows files.

I then restore my OS/Apps image and boot up the drive.

I then partition and format it using Windows Disk Management. I use the slow format again for the partitions.

I then copy over the files I want from the old HD into the appropriate data partitions.

Sometimes the hard way is the easy way!

 

I tried re-installing XP Home and got my new drive set up the way I want it; however, now each time I boot the Acronis restore disk and select a single partition to restore, the system reboots rather than complete the restore. I am again at a total loss on how to get this to work.

I don't understand what is causing the Acronis boot disk to cause the pc to reset and reboot. It doesn't make sense. The software is not behaving nicely. If you have any other thoughts about how to do a restore please let me know.

I thought they called it a hard metal restore or something like that in the advertising; but, it doesn't seem to work that way.

Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks,

Steve

 

I'm afraid I don't have an answer for you. I thought I had seen a similar post but can't find it but that isn't surprising, I need lessons on searching this forum - it never seems to work well for me.

Does it do it right away or does it start the restore and run for a while?

Can you validate the archive from the TI CD version?