Plan B for HP laptop restoration

I have a HP/Compaq Presario laptop that simply won't work with Acronis TI v.11. I can make images that validate just fine but it won't properly boot up to Acronis rescue media no matter what I try. I've made rescue CD's and DVD's, tried several methods for making a bootable flash drive and attempted to make a bootable USB hard drive. It just won't work.

Apparently the problem with properly booting to rescue media is a bios inadequacy or something in the bios that's determined to protect the standard F11 HP recovery system. Either way, there doesn't seem to be a solution to the problem. A long shot possibility is going through all the trouble to create a VistaPE disk... that may or may not work but I don't think I want to tackle the learning curve required to do that.

This thread has all the gruesome details.
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=204309

I'm very afraid if I ever do have to restore a disk image to this HP computer, I'll be hung out to dry since there's a reboot required to restore from within Vista and no way to do it from rescue media. I can play a trick on the CD rescue media and get it to load but if I do, it can't be forced to recognize a USB hard drive.

Plan B: Since I can get a (supposedly) valid image to dvd or USB hard drive drive from within Windows, is it a realistic possibility that if I ever do need to restore this WD 1200BEV SATA hard drive, I can somehow connect it to my desktop computer and do the image restoration from there? I have absolutely no problem booting my desktop PC to any type of Acronis rescue media and it recognizes all possible drive combinations

 

"Plan B" may work, but I would test it before doing it for real. Try a test restore to a spare hard disk and then install the spare in your laptop and try booting from it just to make sure it will work when you need it.

There may be problems with restoring the image to the drive when it is not installed in the laptop. My Lenovo laptop, for example, uses a nonstandard BIOS geometry (240 heads). Most PCs use the standard 255-head geometry. So I must always restore to the drive when it is installed in the laptop. I'm not saying that your laptop will behave the same, but I'd do a test before doing it for real.

Quite honestly, VistaPE may be the path of least resistance. It's not that difficult.

 

I agree. Even if the TI CD would work for you, once you have VistaPE (or BartPE) setup and working, you probably wouldn't go back. It's usually much faster.

 

Plan C. The cheap USB drive I got is not much good. I wasn't hopeful when it started making intermittent clicking noises right out of the box. I guess I've worn it out already.

Today, the rescue CD started recognizing the USB drive so I made some data backups to the USB and was able to properly restore them from the CD booted Acronis system. After that I ran another full backup to test something and started getting data errors. RMA time.

The new plan is get a duplicate WD SATA laptop drive and stick it in an external enclosure. This is the safest way to ensure I can get a good image restoration.

I downloaded the Winbuilder programming last night and will try to go download the WAIK over a wireless DSL connection this weekend. I hope trying to build that PE disk doesn't make my head explode