Acronis True Image 10. How does it Work?

noyb said:

If I can get it to restore by removing my 3rd data partition .. It will not Boot.
Repair 1 from the W7 DVD fixes some W7 files.
Repair 2 from the W7 DVD fixes the Boot.

I'm thinking the confusion is the extra partition that W7 installs in front of the C partition.
Sure wish I knew how to get rid of it.
The new Acronis is in Beta testing right now .. I almost signed up to be a tester.
But decided to wait instead ... I'm in no real hurry to move to W7

I have installed Win7 as a second OS on the second partition of an HDD (overwriting an existing Vista OS) with XP Pro already installed on the first partition.

I have installed Win7 as the only OS on the first partition of another HDD.

I have backed-up and restored all 3 OSes at one point or another. Sometimes needing to repair the boot-loader using Win7 Installation DVD as the bootcd and selecting the Repair Option.

I have yet to have an "extra" partition be created by the Win7 DVD "in front of the C:\ partition".

It is not that I don't believe those who report it, I just cannot replicate under what circumstances it gets created. I assume Win7 is placing the bootloader there, correct? What are its properties (volume label, drive letter, format)?

a) What other OSes are in the multi-boot configuration? XP, Vista, Linux?

b) How are the partitions formatted? FAT, FAT32, NTFS....

c) How many physical drives are available?

d) Is the configuration cross-booting - bootloader on the "primary" drive is booting an OS installed on a partition on a second physical drive? I do not care for this configuration, I want each physical drive to have its own bootloader (personnal quirk :)).

noyb said:

The only Drives I have acronis problems with .. is W7

I've Updated to the M$ rtm versions from TechNet since this picture.

Does your system's BIOS provide an option to specify the HDD boot PRIORITY? In other words to specify not just to boot from the HDD first but WHICH HDD it should try to boot from first, Disk 0 to Disk 3?

noyb said:

YES .. In my HP's .. I can tap the esc key at bootup and a boot menu will appear where I can choose which HD to boot from.
Otherwise it defaults to the first boot device.

However ... I install a System or any Acronis Recovery ... With only one HD connected so all drives are standalones.

I never put my personal Data in my OS ... (can be up to ~200gig worth) ...
And I like to be able to replace/repair just my System Partition.
Having my Data in a third Partition is killing an Acronis recovery.

I know ... This makes no sense ??

Well, I keep all my personal data in other partition besides the OS as well. I would not say it "kills" an ATI recovery, just that it takes longer to backup and restore 100-200 GB.

What I would do in this situation is (assume DISK 3 is the HDD with the extra "System Reserved" partition).

1) Create and TEST and ATI Emergency Boot CD, just in case.... :)

2) Do an image backup of the entire DISK 3 drive with all partitions to another drive's partition for safekeeping.

3) Boot to the Vista OS.

4) Using Windows Disk Management, delete the first 2 partitions on DISK 3.

5) Using Windows Disk Management, create a new primary partition on DISK 3 for the Windows 7 OS using the space created in step 4. Quick format it to NTFS.

6) Restore the Win7 OS partition image backup created in step 2 to the partiton created in step 5. Make the partition ACTIVE if not already set as such.

7) Shutdown. Unplug power cord. Crack open the case and unplug ALL HDDS except DISK 3.

8) Power back up and set the BIOS to boot from the CD/DVD drive.

9) Insert a Windows 7 Installation DVD. Boot to the DVD. Run the Repair option to "fix" the boot loader (probably twice - ?)

10) Reset the BIOS to boot from HDD DISK 3.

Hopefully you will be able to boot now with DISK 3 as a stand-alone HDD to Windows 7 with no "System Reserved" or "extra" partition.

Did any of that make sense?

noyb said:

....
If I erase all the partitions on the HDD …
I can recover the w7 partitions and the MBR .. from an Acronis backup image …
But it takes two repairs with the W7 DVD before it’ll boot properly.

But .. I can clone the entire HDD to another without any problem.
But when cloning .. I cannot specify the partition sizes .. They will be proportionally sized to the size of the new HDD.
And there’s no reason why I should have to wait ages to replace my Huge Data partition when there was nothing wrong with it.

Not being able to operate on a HDD without removing my Huge Data Partition is a show stopper for me.

You don't have to remove the Huge Data partition to get rid of the "extra" partition. That was the initial problem, no? The first paragraph says as much. So the repair operation has to be run twice. That take 3 minutes.

noyb said:

Once I perform Acroins surgery on either (or all) of the first two partitions ...
I'm totally dead as long as my 3rd Data partition is still there.
The only fix is to remove all Partitions.

Two possibilities ???
Something unique about my HP BIOS compounded by W7 ..
Something in the Root of the drive (MBR) and W7 is confusing my system.

The common element is W7 ... I'm wondering if Acronis can fix this.

Weird for sure.

Then I would modify my suggestions to:

1) Delete ALL partitions on the problem HDD.
2) Create a new primary partion for the Win7 OS.
3) Create a second partition for the DATA.
4) Restore the Win 7 OS.
5) Restore the DATA partition.
6) Run the Win7 BootCD repair (twice).