Restoring Issues

Hello, I am new to XP but have been around a few years otherwise.
I am also 2 weeks into playing with Acronis.
I want to learn, experiment, test, try etc before I have to.
I have a few questions concerning with backup and recovery.
I am using ONLY complete backups at this time.
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I am assuming I can use the backup feature from within XP.
I am assuming I can restore this backup after booting, via f11, to the private partition.
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I seem to have hosed up XP SP2 where it WILL NOT BOOT period. It comes up with an error.
I have had this happen 2 times.

How I fix it is I boot to the private partition and try and restore...first from the Acronis zone.
If this fails, I try and boot from the WD usb drive I have the "same" dump saved.

I have had it fail to restore with the xp error and failure to boot on ONE but not Both of the images.

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QUESTION...
Can you backup while within XP and use this image to restore while booting via the F11 to the private partition?

Is it better to backups by first quitting xp and then booting to the Acronis partition and then backing up?

This seems to be the only thing I can find that I am doing differently.
FORTUNATELY I get either the Acronis partition to work or if it fails, my USB drive to work.

Thanks for info....
Ken

 

If you made the bootable Rescue TI cd, I would boot from that and try restoring from your usb drive.

You can backup while "within XP" ... but the TI software eventually shells out to Linux anyway so you are not still in XP. Better to use the bootable TI cd for all Backup and Restore features.

 

That needs some additional clarification.

You can backup any partition (even the system one) from within Windows. I do it every day. TI will not revert to the rescue (Linux) environment to perform the backup, but will instead monitor write requests to that partition, so as to perform the task correctly. TI will block write access to the partion it's imaging for the time needed to read the sector the other party wants to access before it's changed and then it will allow the write to be carried out. Since this is done fast enough, no write error will pop up. That makes possible to even work with other programs while TI is backing up the system partition (that's something I never do).

However, if you start the Recovery Wizard from Windows and you want to restore the system partition, TI will warn you that the partition is in use and will prompt you to either close all running processes (something you can't do IMO, since some of them are core Windows), or reboot. When you select the latter, then yes, TI will reboot into it's rescue (Linux) environment and you'll proceed from therein.

Hope others will correct me if I got it wrong.

I'm aware, though, that many users regard the above procedure as a risky one and avoid it by running TI always from Rescue CD.

 

Just to add to bVolk's comment. I carry on working when a TI backup is running in Windows and the technology works! The only impact is that the opening of a new program can be slowed down and the whole backup process tackes slightly longer. As far as image integrity is concerned there is no problem at all.
I am not a gamer so I have no experience of running one while a backup is being run. I imagine that both would slow right down.

Xpilot.