Imaging a Compaq Presario partitioned drive

Good morning,

I am back again hopefully for some more expertise and guidance from forum users.

I installed Acronis TI 10 last week on my Compaq Presario AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3300+, 2411MHz/1.93 GBs RAM, running Windows Xp Home Sp#2., with IE7.

I then placed an image of my 'C' Drive on my 'external' drive. A validation check said it was successful. Last night I did a 2nd image and it too went off without a hitch.

Right now I am in the process of hunting for another internal hard drive so I can fully test my ATI backup images.

However, in the meantime, I just got to thinking about something. This Compaq computer comes with a partitioned internal drive. The 'C' partition holds my operating system while the 'D' drive is where Compaq put their computer restore feature.

The first two images I made with ATI only consisted of the 'C' partition, should I include the 'D' partition when I am creating these restore images with ATI?

Thanks and regards,

2harts4ever

 

That's up to you. I would recommend that you make at least one full-disk backup image of your COMPAQ machine so that if its internal disk ever fails you can restore the full-disk image to a new disk and thus retain the recovery partition. However, for periodic backups I would only make images of the C partition.

Another school of thought is that once you have done a test restore to your spare drive and confirm that it works, then who needs the recovery partition?

 

Morning k0lo,

I appreciate the quick response and your recommendation.

Thanks and regards,

2harts4ever

 

K0lo is right on. The problem is that sometimes a system won't boot after a restore if the entire disk (all partitions and MBR) isn't included in the image. That's why it's smart to keep one image of the entire disk.

If you can restore just the C partition and the MBR to a new drive, and it boots correctly, then you know that you don't need the image of all partitions unless you want to keep the Compaq recovery partition. Frankly, I'd keep at least one copy of that image.

Some day you may want to sell or give the computer to someone. If you have the Compaq partition, you can put it back to the day you bought it and remove all your data and programs in one step.

In the meantime, you only need to backup the C partition and you can even delete the Compaq partition and add it to C or use it for data.

 

Hi jmk94903i,

I appreciate the followup to my post and k0lo's response.

Thanks and regards,

2harts4ever

 

2Harts4Ever,

If you have a little spare time, you might find these postings interesting.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=184443

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=184414

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=184392

 

Hi GroverH,

I briefly looked at two of them previously but will look a little more carefully this time.

Thanks and regards,

2harts4ever

 

Hmmm, it just occured to me. 2harts... are you an early Core 2 Duo clone?

 

Morning jmk94903,

You lost me on that one

Thanks and regards,

2harts4ever

 

Sorry about that. All the new systems are coming with dual core processors. Sort of like a computer with two hearts.

It was a bad what ever it was.