How to transfer data image to ext HDD??

Well I now have my CD ROM ini. first in Boot Priority on my toshiba notebook after some fiddling around and help from the toshiba notebook forum so I can make my Rescue CD after I Create the Image onto my external HDD.

Now my problem is that I have never used a ext HDD as my software techie that did the Ghost for me took care of that. (BTW my Boot Priority was HDD>FDD>CD ROM>LAN) The techie restored my Ghost on one occasion when the Toshiba warranty depot was replacing my mouse and scroll wheel and messed up my BIOS password and the Depot set my Notebook back so that it was like new out of the box and missing all my programs etc. I was wondering how he did this when he said that he had a Boot Cd and yet my settings were with the HDD first?
Also will I notice any change now that the CD ROM ini. is first in priority
I bought a new Maxtor 300 gig ext HDD so that I can store my backup there and also a file of My Pictures.
I know the drive is Plug n Play and that is it.
I connect it to the usb 2, however I don't know where to go from there

As mentioned earlier I gather that I will have to create 2 files on the drive as I want my pictures separate from my backup.
But how do I get started after I plug in the Maxtor

I am sorry for the mundane question, however I have not used such a device and don't know what to do.
I don't even use a jump drive.

When I plug the Maxtor in and select it in My Computer or at least I think that is what I do and Open it.
Will a window open and then I do a right click on the screen to Create a New folder and name it ATI? and create another one and name it My Pictures?

Then start the ATI program and will it ask where the destination is?
And how do I send my pictures to the file? Do I do a ctrl a to highlite,ctrl c, and then ctrl p?? What is the easiest way as I am not familiar with having 2 windows open at once.
So you can see I am really a Noob at all of this.
And what I described above may all be wrong, so I would really appreciate all the advice available out there.

Thankyou for your time and patience with this Noob and Cheers!!!

 

You may want to change your bios so the boot sequence is
Option 1:
..CDrom
..Floppy
..HDrive

During bootup,it will check for
1. a CD . If the cd is a bootable CD, it will attempt to boot from the CD. If the CD is not bootable, or tray empty. The bootup will continue to next option
2. a Floppy drive. Again, if there is a floppy disc inside, it will attempt to boot from it. If the floppy disc is not bootable, it will stop and ask for the floppy disc to be remove. However, normally, the floppy tray is empty and bootup continues to next option--which is hard drive.

or a sequence of
option 2:
..CDROm
..HDrive
..Floppy
'Booting from a floppy is rare these days and many choose to have the bios bypass this option for a quicker more problem free boot. Should you want to boot from the floppy drive, it can always be configured for that particular occasion. I prefer option 2.

As for copying between drives:
When you attach the external drive. You MAY get a window which opens asking what action do you want to do. The normal is to either option "do nothing"; or option "view files in explorer". Or, you may not get the window.

To copy from one drive to another is no different than copying between one folder and another and there is about half-dozen different ways to perform the copy function. All are acceptable methods--it just depends upon your choice of methods.

a.Click on "My computer" and click on the external drive (now one window open).
Click on "My computer" again and now click on the other drive which contains the files to be copied onto the external drive. (Now 2 windows open)

b. Now, you have 2 windows open (1 window for each drive)
You can put your mouse pointer into either window and click on the listing of folders until you have the correct folders open.
..you can drag the files from the data folder to the external drive.
..or, you can drag the entire folder
..or, you can highlight the folder or files and right click and choose copy or move, etc.

If two windows open, you can resize (if preferred) or right click an empty spot on your taskbar (bottom middle) and choose the "tile window horizontally" option (or vertically).

Or, another option is to only open one window (the source) and right click the folder or files and choose the copy or move to option. If you choose the "move to" option, you must then continue browsing until you find the intended location.
Or, if you choose the copy option, you highlight the grouping of files and click copy, then traverse to the intended folder and then right click again and choose the paste option.

The use of Ctrl C & Ctrl P work very nicely. It comes down to how you learn and which feels most comfortable.

If you are not familiar with the various copy methods, I would suggest you create a couple test folders and test (text) files and practice moving and copying and deletion. Should you make a mistake, you can usually immediately right click an open area and choose the "undo" function. Practice makes perfect!

When disconnecting the external drive, click on its icon located in systray (lower right) and click on the device so it can indicate when safe to remove.

External drive should not be left attached all the time--for security reasons such as viruses or power fluctations/strikes--which could destroy your backup data.

As indicated in a previous posting, you can get a lot of help by reviewing this 4 part tutorial.
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/company/inpress/2006/06-15-1ati.html

One nice thing about TrueImage is that you can do a trial run (simulate) doing a backup or a restore thru all the various screens until you reach the point where the next option reads "Proceed". Do not press the "Proceed" option unless you really intend for the activity to begin.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=185364&stc=1&d=1164484722

When working with open windows, you can click/hold on the top bar and move the window. Or hover your mouse over any of window margins (or corners)and the pointer will change to a dual direction arrow and you can change the width of the window. Once you have the window sized to your liking, you can close the window and it will usually open next time with the same features.

 

He may have changed the BIOS order temporarily, or there may be an option to boot from CD when the notebook is first booting. For example, look for a message like F12 for boot device.

No, except that it will now boot from a bootable CD if one is in the drive.

The utility for working with files and folders on drives is called Windows Explorer. You can hold down the Windows key (between the Ctrl and Alt key) and press the E key to start it, or click the Start button on the Taskbar, go to All Programs and scroll up to Accessories. Widows Explorer is listed under Accessories.

On the left side of Windows Explorer, select the USB drive. Click on Files on the menu line then New and click on Folder. Name the folder ATI.

Click again on the USB drive on the left side, repeate the Files/New/Folder setps and name the second folder Pictures.

You can use the same procedure to create new folders within existing folders.

These are very basic Windows procedures that you apparently missed learning. The For Dummies books, in spite of their name, are good at teaching this basic stuff that is easy to miss.

 

Bear in mind the restrictions on FAT & FAT32 - external USB HDD will use these formats, See the notes in the user guide 5.3.6 regarding splitting of large backups to external drives.

 

Thankyou very much for the replies, I have a few what I considered quality books for reference to as I never did take a full blown course which I realize that I should.
I do accounting by profession and thus don't do a lot of this type of activity with my notebook.
And of course the software tech did the Ghost which cost myself and the better half too much $ and he is increasing his rates to $75 per Ghost and we have them done once a month.
So we were looking for a user friendly program that we could learn to use.

I am getting confused here, as I thought that a wizard would simply go through the whole notebook and clone it??
Or do I have to tell ATI what I want cloned??

Also, since I changed the BIOS to CD ROM ini. as first to Boot; I now have to sit and wait until :

" CLIENT MAC ADDR DO D8 OD D3 CT DC"
GUID and a bunch of F's appear on the screen and also what appears to be a rotating D complete their appearance on the Screen before I can get to Windows. Does this have to be?

As this seems to take sometime before I actually get the "Windows" open. I assume that I do have to put up with this from now on in the event that I have to Boot from the Rescue Disk should I have a crash which I never have had. That is why I wondered why the techie Ghosted the notebook and had it with the Boot Sequence as HDD>FDD>CD ROM>LAN.
How would the notebook boot if it was not setup as CD ROM ini. first

Or does Ghost have an added feature that you don't need this CD ROM ini. to boot from? me>>>>>

I know with Toshiba notebooks the OEM Restore Disk that comes with the unit does not have Windows separate and so it requires use of this disk if there is a crash and it puts the notebook back to being brand new as if it were out of the box (a real pain) with no windows separate disk, hence I wanted a "clone" of my drive and want to do it monthly. Is this where the "CD Rescue Disk" comes in since my Toshiba System Restore Disk does not have a Windows Boot Disk, simply a Restore Disk with all the proggys that came with the notebook?

I know that I shouldn't defrag and clone; however I would insure that all of my updates were done and scan for malware as I always do regularly on a daily basis.
But does the Wizard actually clone everything or is there something that I have to do?
If there is I am a little uneasy about that as I am no techie. And need all my programs and settings cloned for work.

I guess I am simply curious as to how the Software techie would be able to boot my notebook to get the Ghost Image onto the notebook when it was set up to boot HDD first??

I apologize for the mundaneness of the questions, as you can tell I am new to all of this tech process and want to insure that I don't step into a mine field.

I thankyou for your replies and I especially found the last post with the reading material very beneficial.
Cheers and best regards.

 

You just select one backup of the entire hard drive if there are more than one partition shown for the drive in TrueImage. Save that image since it's needed to restore the manufacturer's hidden partitions which never change. For all future backups you need only choose the C partition assuming that you only had one visible partition on your hard drive. That's the normal setup for new computers.

You only need to have the CD as the first boot device to restore an image using the Recovery CD. You can change it to that when needed. First, check that you have the CD drive first and not LAN. I've never seen a message such as you describe when the boot order is 1. CD(or DVD) 2. Hard drive 3. Floppy drive. Also, disable the LAN option since you can't boot that way, or at least make it last.

Just put the CD first when you want to boot from the Recovery CD. Leave it HDD first the rest of the time if there is a delay.

No it doesn't.

You can forget about the Toshiba Restore disk. You don't want to put it back to the day you bought it except when you are giving the computer away.

You use TrueImage to create images every month, or as often as you decide is necessary. Then if there is a problem, you can restore the image and have everything back up to the time you made that image. Since this is a business computer, you might want to make images weekly. Would you want to lose a month's worth of work?

A correction in terminology. A clone is a hard drive that is exactly like the one it was cloned from. You don't want to do that.

You want to make backup images of the entire disk or partition. You can store many images on an external hard drive since the image is only of the used portion of the hard drive and is compressed. You are probably using only 9-15GB of your hard drive, so the image will be 6-12GB. You can store a lot of images on a 160GB or 250GB external hard drive.

You also want to keep backups that are at least one to three months old. Sometime things happen slowly to a computer. Viruses often work that way. A one week old backup is useless for recovering the operating system and programs, but a month or two month old backup is perfect. Today, I restored an August backup to a system that had a slow acting virus.

The best procedure before a backup is to run the Windows XP error checking, run DiskCleanup, and then defrag the disk. That way you know that you are making a copy of an error free hard disk and also taking the least time to make it. Note, you are making an image and not cloning.

When you select the C partition, you are making an image of everything you use: Windows, programs and all your data and settings. That's why image backups are so valuable - they capture it all.

The real question is how much data can you afford to lose in the event that something happens to your notebook? If it is stolen or dropped or the hard drive fails or a virus corrupts the drive, how much can you afford to lose? That tells you how often you need to backup. If you can't afford to lose one day's work, you need to backup every night. You can do that, but you might need to buy a second external drive.

You can also backup only your data with TrueImage rather than the entire hard drive. However, to make this work, you have to know where your data is stored on the hard drive and select only those folders to be backed up. The advantage is that the backups are much smaller, perhaps one tenth or one hundredth the size of a full image. If you need to backup every day, you may want to learn how to do data only backups. On the other hand, you can just buy another big external drive for $100-$200.

Backups are insurance. You have to decide how much insurance you need. The price is in your time to make the backups and the external drives you buy to hold them all.

What about a robbery or fire? Do you need to keep backups in a second location? If you have an office, take one external drive home with you and leave a second in the office. Keep swapping them, but don't ever have both external drives in the same place as your notebook because then one event could wipe out all copies. It's very sad to see the data on a computer and all the backup copies lost because they were sitting next to each other.

Do you need more security against disaster? Some people also backup just their data over the Internet. That way it is in a secure location far away, but it costs $10-$20 per month. Do you need that much insurance?

What you may want is to find a computer tech who will help you decide what you need and show you how to do it rather than do it for you. You can pay him/her to double check your backups once in a while, but not pay for every backup.

 

John, this reply has been excellent and a lot of info for thought.

1. the software techie that did my former Ghost has a partition on my HDD which I never wanted and don't even know what it is. As when I do a Perfect Disk defrag I only choose "C" to do the process as "F" on the HDD he created for Ghost and would not explain why?? And this partition is now taking up space that I would like to have.
I want to rid of that partition as I don't want ATI and Ghost getting mixed up here when I am a Noob starting up. How do I do that. Remember I have never had a crash in 6 years and have a security system that I use regularly, what I mean to say is update and scan and am on hi speed with my Router and Alpha Shield as well. Comments appreciated. ( I run NAV, Trojan Hunter, Spy Bot, Spyware Blaster and off and on Avert's Stinger) and also defrag with Perfect Disk as required when I notice a slow down.
I should say that I use Tune Up 6 as a Reg Cleaner and Optimizer. I have seen comments for and against the proggy.
I used to use Reg Supreme set at Reg mode and not "Deep" but seemed to notice issues and thus switched after this proggy to "Advanced System Optimizer" which seemed to do the job and then it bogged down and so I am using Tune Up 6.
I don't want to run out and start using a Reg Cleaner beyone my capabilities and thus I google and see what is recommended and what I feel comfortable with.
In one forum it was said that Tune Up 6 was full of spyware?
But I have found it does the job for me And takes a b/u snapshot as most do, however the notebook works great after I run the proggy hence I continue to use it. The member of the Forum that I was at did not say why hiis view was that there was malware in the Tune Up 6

2. How do I get rid of the "F" partition that the software techie has on my notebook as it is taking up space and I have never wanted it there anyway??
That is the Ghost The program itself is it not

3. I don't see how to disable the LAN, as I use the space bar to manoever around the BIOS boot sequence and it simply goes from HDD>FDD>CD-ROM>LAN and I select one of them to start at boot.
I have tried to use the space bar to make changes and it seems that all that can be done is to make a choice of the "boot start" and "save" and "exit".

4.So I don't know how to disable LAN, I even went into the Toshiba General Support Forum to inquire and the above described in item 3 was what I was advised. How to disable LAN, I don't know and why would I want to do that??

5. I went back and checked to see what actually goes on in this process now that CD ROM ini. is set for "Boot" so that I am not misadvising and the following indeed does occur:
After I put in my BIOS Password, I sit and wait while "Intel Boot Agent" 4.1.06 shows on the screen and the Message:
CURRENT MAC ADDR D0 08 0D D3 C7 0C
GUID and 8 F's, 4 F's. and another 4 F's clustered together and
DHCP ....\ and the backward slash spins around with all of the above info until the Windows Login Window appears and thus I wondered if this was taking me longer to access the notebook since I was now in CD ROM ini. instead of HDD which the notebook was originally at when the techie was allegedly using the Ghost proggy to restore my notebook which he did only ONCE when the warranty depot screwed up the BIOS password and my notebook quit asking for it and their cure for it was to set the notebook back to where it was when it came out of the box brand new and he Ghosted it.
I left the notebook with him and he put the image back on that I was formerly using.

5. How does the notebook boot if I crash and I set it back to HDD instead of CD ROM ini. the sequence I now have the Boot setup to
Remembering that with these Toshiba notebooks there is no separate Windows boot disk and that one has the ONLY option of restoring the notebook to as it came out of the box brand new without all of the programs and settings that exist on the unit before a crash?
Never had a crash, hence know nothing of what a computer is capable of doing when one occurs and I do know that some notebooks are odd birds, like this Toshiba with the OEM System Restore Disk.
You pay a lot of money for these notebooks and there is a lot of pain involved if they crash and the manufacturer only will pay for the stupid OEM disk and let the user agonize over getting it back to the way you want it at the time it crashed.
I focus on this as the Image is what I need on the notebook.
I was going to try out the Free AIT vers 7 as it was free and see if I am comfortable with it, however after googling and posting in some forums some members say that the vers 9 which is available here in Canada at Staples is better to use at it tests the integrity of the image on the drive before the image is done?? Is that true. The member said that was the major difference in the 2 versions and hence I may want to go with that one instead of the free version.
Yet the sales rep in the store. who I am certain has more expertise than me said he uses vers 7 and was shocked that it is now free as he bought his awhile back and he says that it is sufficient for his needs and should be for mine!!!

6. My notebook is only 60 gigs of which one third is used and when the Ghost was done by the techie it took no more than 1 hr 15 min.
As stated the Maxtor One Touch is 300 gig external and I will likely after I feel comfortable using it, delete prior Images.

7. I see that you suggest a Disk Clean up and defrag before the ATI and of course use my security scans.
I assume that I keep the Alpha Shield on while doing this

8. Then upon completion I would create my Rescue Disk as I did not choose to do this when I installed the ATI vers 7 as it said I could do it later and I was not in my comfort zone with the program at that time and am still feeling my way around until I really feel confident that I know what I am doing.

I really thankyou for your time and hope that these are the final queries that I will post before I jump in and try this out.

Cheers, with best regards and again thankyou for your time!!!

You are indeed a dedicated and knowledgeable member for which I give great thankyous.

 

Thanks.

If he created a partiton and refused to say why, you really need a new tech. If you just didn't ask him at the time, then that's OK. You want to keep a second partition if poossible because it's a great place to store a backup image for easy use when you are traveling. However, if you are running out of space, the it has to go. A disk partitioning program such as Disk Director can remove the F: partition and add the space back to your C: partition. There are tricky ways to do that, but I suggest you buy Disk Director or have a tech do it for you.

If your hard drive is six years old, and if you use this machine for work every day, you are reaching a point where disk failure would not be surprising. I don't want to alarm you, but many disks fail in less time. Good backups will protect you.

It's possible that Ghost was installed on the F: partition, but that would be unusual. F: is problably just a data partition to store images or utilities. If you will no longer be using Ghost, the go to Add/Remove programs in the Control Panel and uninstall it before removing the F: partition.

What doesn't make sense is that you said you changed the boot sequence and then started getting a slower bootup with the MAC address messages. However, you describe the order as still showing the HDD first. Normaly the current sequence would be displayed. However, it doesn't matter.

Since you can choose which device to boot from, there is no reason to chage the order permanently in the BIOS setup. So, put it back the way it was and just select CD-ROM with the space bar when you want to boot that way.

And it doesn't matter. Just put the order back the way it was and choose the device when you want to boot from the CD.

You choose the CD-ROM and boot from the Acronis Recovery disk.

I can't remember whether version 7 has a verification feature for the backup, but I know it is not as good as version 9 which I'd recommend. You can experiment with 7, but I'd buy version 9 for continuing use.

Does your notebook have USN 2.0 ports? It's old enough that it might only have USB 1.1 which is much slower than USB 2.0. You can buy a PC card with USN 2.0 ports to speed things up. If you need to do that, I suggest you buy the Adaptec PC card.

Yes.

You only need to create the Recovery CD once unless you upgrade the version/build of TrueImage. You can do that now and test that it boots your notebook successfully.

You really should talk to some friends and locate a new tech who can help you with these various problems and provide instruction on how to do what you want.

Like many professionals, you are being your own computer tech. However, you are going to take quite a while learning on your own. Think about how much you could be making if you were working your real job with those hours. You could pay a tech as a business expense and come out with more money in your pocket and a more reliable solution.

 

jmk94903,
Nice post!

 

New to Acronics: I just used Acronics to clone my HD. The problem is that some how my original HD was wape out!!. I still have the cloned HD. How can I copy cloned HD back to my original HD. Please advice.



Since I am new to this site also, I do not know post a new thread yet so I am doing it here.

 

Give us some information so that we can help:

1. What version of Acronis TrueImage are you using?

2. Can you boot from the cloned hard drive?

3. Why were you cloning your hard drive if you didn't want to replace it?

4. Do you have an external hard drive or a second internal hard drive that has enough free space to save an image of your boot drive?

Since you had a problem with cloning, I think it would be a good idea to make a backup image of the drive (not a clone) so that if something goes wrong again, you have a recovery route.

 

Re: Cloning Problem

periII,

You probably selected the manual mode for cloning and selected one of the following:

- Create a new partition layout (all existing partitions and their data will be deleted)
- Destroy data (destroy all data on the old disk)

But in both cases ALL the data will be cloned to the new disk, so you won't lose it.

You can clone again, now from new drive to old one and select "Keep data" when wizard ask you.

Download the User's Guide and check Chapter 13. Transferring the system to a new disk.

_Kento_

 

jmk94903 You did explain to wills, (and anybody viewing this thread) that he should be making a image and not cloning. As reported on this forum cloning will erase the original drive. ( I don't know why it is this way). It probably would be clearer to all new users if the term "image" was used in the wizard instead of "backup". I did find that confusing when I first started, if I hadn't worked in Telephony were we had to do a daily image of our software, I probably would have picked "clone" instead of backup.
If periII cloned to an internal drive he can unplug that drive and plug it in where the main disk is plugged in. Please understand that an image is a picture (image) of your hard drive and can restore your hard drive back to it's original state ( operating system, registry, mbr) so in most instances a clone is very rarely needed.
Hopefully he has a rescue disk and he can image as jmk94903 says.
I wish that there was some place that we could post jmk94903 excellent instructions above for all to read.

 

periII - I have removed your duplicate post from another thead and moved a reply (by _Kento_) to you from that thread to here. Please try to avoid duplicate posting - it only leads to confusion.