image drive or partitions?

I have 2 partitions on my drive: C: is XP and those brain dead apps that only install there and D: is most of my apps and data. When I create an image I can select one or both partitions or just select the whole drive. Is there any difference in the image(s) created? Doing 1 partition at a time results in 1 image set per partition. Whats the result if I check both partitions or if I check the drive box? How about the effect, if any, on restores? Curious minds, at least mine , want to know.

 

Hello Riechert --

You can create both an image of your partitions and your drive as a whole. Though please mind that if you image partitions - MBR is not copied, so if you want to restore that image on another HDD it won't be bootable - if you want it to be bootable you need to do an image of the whole drive.

Thank you.

 

Anton,

That's an important difference that I didn't see in the manual. Thanks for pointing that out.

Jerry

 

Anton, I just did a test and it does not seem to support your statement.

My primary hard drive has 3 partitions. I only routinely image my C: drive. As an experiment, I created a new VMWare OS with a blank (unallocated) disk. I was able to restore my C: partition image to the disk, and it was indeed bootable. It started up into Win2k.

It appears that TrueImage re-creates the MBR during the restore process. I was able to select the partition as "Active" when going through the restore dialog sequence.

I'm trying to figure out the implications of not having the MBR backed up as part of a whole-disk image. Would it be correct to say that any non-standard MBR would be lost in the process? For example, say I have a custom GRUB MBR on my hard drive to handle mutiple operating systems. If I had wiped out my hard drive and restored the C:partition, would that MBR be lost? (And replaced with some sort of generic MBR?)

If that's not the case, then what is?
Thanks.

 

Hello Wdormann --

Well, it would be more correct to say that if you restore this way - you may end up with non-bootable system. Sometimes HDDs come with some basic MBR written on them, so in that case your system might boot. It also might boot if you fo FIXMBR but again only in case the initial MBR was standard.

Thank you.

 

Since switching to TI I have imaged and restored my C drive (on the same disk) and it worked and booted fine. Perhaps I'm being dumb and misunderstanding what is being meant in this and your previous post.

To me, one of the main purposes of using a disk image tool is that I have an image that I can use to re-install on another hard disk in the event of a catastrophic failure of the existing hard disk.

So are you saying that if I want to make an image of my C drive (OS installed - 10GB partition) that could be used on a replacement hard disk I really need to make an image of the whole 40GB disk rather than a 10GB partition just to be sure it would be bootable? That doesn't make sense and if that's the case I'll go back to using Ghost.

Or are you referring to the other OS partitions in a multi-boot environment that wouldn't be bootable if installed on their own on a new disk? If so, I can appreciate that there may be boot issues doing that.

Can you please clarify. Thanks


edit: If installed a new HDD I would always FDISK first so MBR wouldn't be an issue - are you refeering to straight out the box restore to a new HDD?

 

I'm a new user to TI8 and here's what I've done...

I have two drives. My first drive consists of several partititons: C, D, E. My second drive is configured as a single drive, F.

C contains XP and utilities, while D contains main apps.

I used TI8 (build 76 to create a single image of drives C & D.

When I attempt to restore, I have to reboot into TI safe mode because TI8 can't restore the system partition while it's loaded.

After the reboot I can restore both, although you have to go thru the menu procedures twice, one for C and one for D.

Luckily it worked.

 

Hello --

Well, if your MBR on your initial disk was standard - it would do the job of course. But if you had some complex system with several OSes present there, you need to do the image of the whole drive to ensure that MBR will be copied in order to let all the OSes operate properly.

Thank you.

 

Was very glad to see the last post correction made by Support about the multible Boot OS's and not having to Image the complete hard drive to retain a 'normal' MBR. I have always just imaged my C: Drive (Active partition with WinXP Pro) and have recovered it several times with TI 7 and am now using v.8 (lastest build). Was nervous about the reply about 'whole disk' and MBR. Good to know that only the C: (Active Partition with one operating system only) will restore to another new hard drive if needed. I really 'knew' this had to be the case as if I understand correctly, when restoring a partition and it is the active one or not...*all* the partition is 'wiped' including the MBR. The restore then replaces the Imaged MBR,which is 'on' the previous Image made with TI from whatever media or source it has been stored on, presuming it is the active one with the OS.

I, for one, have had no problems with True Image 8, although I haven't tried a complete recovery with 8, only a test with the boot CD. I always burn backups copied to an internal hard drive then burn to CD-R's with Nero , but mostly use my internal hard drive for backups, with one older Image saved to CD-R's. Only Images burned more often are data partitions to CD-R's for saver keeping. So far haven't had to use the CD-R's for recovery.

Hope my first post is not too confusing.

Allen L.