Hypothetical at this point...

I recently had a complete (SCSI) hard disk melt down and the disk had to be swapped out with a new SCSI hard drive of a similar size but of a different brand.

I eventually ended up reloading my entire operating system and programs even though I had a complete image from about a month before. My recovery disk could see the image I was trying to restore and there was no problem with the image itself. However the system would not restore it. Is this because I was trying to restore the image to a different hard drive?

Also, this is probably a dumb question, but if my hard drive is NTFS and I back up to a FAT32 drive will there be any problems restoring my new images?

Thanks,
RT

 

Hi RT,

Restoring a good image to a new drive of the same type (i.e. PATA to PATA, SATA to SATA or SCSI to SCSI) should not have been a problem. When you say "the system would not restore it" what do you mean? Did the image not restore to the new drive or did the new drive fail to boot into Windows after the restore?

No problem at all.

Regards

 

Even restoring a good image to a new of a DIFFERENT type should not be problem. But ... if you try to run an operating system of it, the OS might be plenty confused and will try to install new disk drivers "in mid-air". It might work, and it might not...

 

Hello Menorcaman,
I believe that that Acronis would restore the disk image successfully, but then I kept getting a system error when I would attempt to reboot the system. Not having access to web or support at the time I opted for reloading everything.
Thanks,
RT

 

Hmm. All water under the bridge now but did you image the whole source drive by ensuring the tickbox next to the drive letter was selected? Unless the complete drive is imaged the MBR will not be included. Also, because of the vagaries of NTFS and drive letter assignments, it might be worth having a read of this <Dan Goodsell article> in case you ever need to do swap out a drive again.

Regards