Question about restoring system partition.

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by Segovia, Oct 17, 2006.

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  1. Segovia

    Segovia Registered Member

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    Hello everyone.

    I have a physical drive that is seperated into two partitions - C and D. The "My Documents" folder for each user has been moved to the D partition, while WindowsXP and all applications are on the C partition.

    I only make Acronis images of the C partition. And so my question is - in the event the whole physical disk is hosed, will I be able to restore that image, or will Windows crash/complain that it cannot find the My Documents folders? (because they are on D:, which is not in the image.)

    I'm guessing that windows will simply recreate the My Documents folders in the default location, or if it finds a D drive, it will try to recreate them there? Anyone can confirm this? I don't want to do a restore, only to find out that Windows won't boot because it can't find those folders.

    Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.
     
  2. foghorne

    foghorne Registered Member

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    Hi Segovia,

    the location of your "My Documents" folders will not affect Windows booting. If you restore your system partition and the D: drive does not exist, you will simply get a warning when you log in, and then My Documents will then default to somewhere on C:.

    No problem booting.

    F.
     
  3. bVolk

    bVolk Registered Member

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    Last edited: Oct 17, 2006
  4. foghorne

    foghorne Registered Member

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    Note: This is only relevant if the original C: partition is not the first in the sequence of partitions.

    F.
     
  5. bVolk

    bVolk Registered Member

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    I'm afraid not.

    It's relevant whenever one attempts to restore the system partition from an image originating from a drive with a different partition layout (in terms of total number of partitions) than the destination drive has.
     
    Last edited: Oct 17, 2006
  6. foghorne

    foghorne Registered Member

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    would you care to expand on your theory. This is something I have done a lot without problem for many years. Perhaps I have just been lucky.

    F.
     
  7. bVolk

    bVolk Registered Member

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    Hello foghorne,

    That's according to the clarification given by Acronis Support. I accepted that and now I have my strategy set up per their instructions. Didn't carry out any tests to verify whether the precaution was indeed required, but it seems to me that at least boot.ini would be mismatched. I have no idea about improper entries in the registry, if any.

    You may want to have a quick look at the whole thread. I added the link to the thread the very moment you posted your #4. :D
     
  8. foghorne

    foghorne Registered Member

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    Hi bVolk,

    thanks for the second link. I may be mistaken, but there is still no explanation in this link of *why* restoring a single active partition to a disk which was backed up from a multi partition should fail.

    In this particular case, I think we can assume that the only reference which can affect the windows system itself is the location of the My Documents folder. The absence of this does not affect boot up (a scenario I have come across many times without problem) and indeed does not appear to be an issue until logging on anyway, so we can forget about that. What other cross partition references can cause a problem at boot up - I have not come across any so far.

    I think it is important that some scientific explanation of why and when this may be a problem should be proposed rather than the vague "may not boot" suggestion which we currently have.

    For example. If I have a new disk and install a single new copy of XP on it, and then at a later date restore a C OS partition from a multi partition backup over the top - without changing the MBR, and assuming the boot.ini reference is the same I cannot see why this would not work - and I am sure this is something I have done many times.

    Another scenario is where we have a brand new disk and do the same restoration but this time additionally we restore the MBR. Why would this not work.

    Sorry for being thick, but it I think it would be useful to demystify the theory you quoted with a scientific explanation - for me at least :D


    Thanks
    F.
     
  9. Segovia

    Segovia Registered Member

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    Thanks for the help foghorne and bVolk.

    So what I'm getting, from reading the thread that bVolk posted, and your experience, foghorne, is:

    - If only restoring the C partition to the same disk with the same partition layout, there should be no issues at all.

    - If restoring the C partition to a new unformatted disk, there might be a problem, due to the D partition missing entirely. If a problem is encountered, the solution would be to simply pre-format the new drive with the same number of partitions as the original drive had - then restore.

    - Windows will not "freak out" on a user login if it cannot find the My Documents folder at the location it's supposed to be at.
     
  10. jaycee

    jaycee Registered Member

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    You've got it!

    Always try and keep in mind how it was before when you restore, to be able in case of problems to recreate the same schema.

    Good restore!

    Jaycee
     
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