Recovery from Hard Disc crash

Just started using TI and would like to know that if my hard disc with OS etc. should crash completely can I restore a TI backup image (on CD or another hard drive) to a new and possibly different make and size of Hard Drive. Obviously I would be unable to clone the drive or could this be done from a backup image. Would I have to install a version of Windows XP first and/or anything else. I use XP Pro SP2

 

Yes as long as it is not prohibitively smaller in size than the original.
Note that you may run into problems with windows activation if the whole machine is totally different from the original.

 

Thanks Foghorn but are you saying I can restore from a backup image to a brand new hard drive that will boot up without installing anything else or am I misunderstanding your reply.

 

Yes - you can restore without having anything installed - the backup and restore are done at the sector level so anything on the target partition will be overwritten anyway.

In terms of booting, when you restore you need to ensure that the partition is restored as the 'Active' partition. This is an option in the restore wizard.