Windows 7 Professional vs. Home Premium

harpua · 17 Jul 2009

I haven't had any problem using Acronis TIH 2009 "utilities" to "Clone" (not image/restore) my entire hard drive in W7. Works great. I always keep a fairly recent clone of my system around in addition to doing regular image backups. I haven't tried to restore from image backups of W7 yet, but I don't really trust or like to rely on only them, hence why I always do regular clones of the entire primary drive. Takes me just a couple of minutes to physically swap in a cloned disk into my laptop with no worries about restore from image failing.

juron99 · 17 Jul 2009

Peter,

I haven't been able to figure it out. I have a dual operating system; XP x64 and Win7 x64. After run Acronis twice making sure I copied from the primary to the backup, both times I lost everything. Like I said is was if I was copying from the wrong drive. Because I got tired of reinstalling the operating system I gave up on Acronis.

Ron

harpua · 17 Jul 2009

I can certainly understand your frustration with it if something like that keeps happening. All I know is it works for me in a single OS boot situation. I don't know why it doesn't for you.

Something like that happened to me one time with an earlier version of ATIH2009 where it appeared to clone but completed way too quickly and did not actually clone anything. But at least it left the source drive intact, afaicr. I haven't had any problems like that with the latest version which has been reliably making clones for me without any problems.

juron99 · 18 Jul 2009

I've used Acronis in the past with XP and usually was successful with it. This time it appeared to go through the cloning process but after rebooting, I came up with a black screen. When I booted to the CD it showed my primary drive with only a small partition and a backup file that I had created under Windows7. This partition was supposed to be on the second hard drive. The second hard drive was empty. Like I said it was as if it copied the second drive to the primary drive. Yes, I know it sounds like I messed up but that is why I did it a second time and had the same problem. I could try it a third time and reverse the order of copying and see if it works correctly but it takes me about four hours to re-install , add apps and tweak. Maybe I don't understand what source drive and destination drive means anymore. I am getting older.

Ron

juron99 · 18 Jul 2009

After posting above, I got to thinking that maybe my problem is the Boot Manager. Windows 7 has its own and XP also has its own. When I formated the second hard drive it asked if I wanted to make it bootable and I said yes. If I remember right it seems like I got the message NTLR not found when I rebooted. I assume Windows 7 copied over the old MBR during the clone process. Not sure why Bios was looking for XP boot loader instead of Windows 7 Boot manager.

Ron

harpua · 18 Jul 2009

I believe Acronis copies the mbr from the source and after the cloning is completed it puts a little utility on the target drive that only runs the first time you attempt to boot from the target drive and this utility writes the MBR so the drive becomes properly bootable the first time you try to boot from it. This makes it possible to use the target as a secondary drive without there being two drives in the system both trying to boot. At least this is my theory. I'm not sure if this has anything at all to do with the problems you're experiencing.

Actually, I suspect your problems may stem from a corrupt installation of Acronis or perhaps using an earlier buggy version. The version I'm using that is working on my x64 system under W7 build 7600 is Acronis v. 12.0.9796.

juron99 · 18 Jul 2009

I'm more apt to think my problem has something to do with the way Windows 7 installs its boot manager. The problem probably started with me having two hard drives connected when I installed Win 7. The installation may have put the boot manager on the second hard drive to protect it. Somewhere I read it may do this during install. I don't know if I'll be able to figure it out but my client already messed up the installation and is bringing the computer over this morning for probably a clean install. I'm not giving him XP as a dual anymore so Acronis may work this time. I'll disconnect the second hard-drive until I'm finished installing then do the clone.

Ron

DJG · 18 Jul 2009

noyb said:

NO ..
There are many things that Vista or W7 cannot do .. If you know how to set up and use XP.

Can you elaborate? I'm curious. Thanks!

noyb · 18 Jul 2009

This attached list keeps growing ...

noyb · 18 Jul 2009

More specificaly ..
I like to do image editing and may have several image files on my desktop ..
some with the same file name, but different file types.

In XP, I can customize my Desktop Icons so I can easily see the file type.
These are a customized Irfanview Icon set
Vista or W7 will not let me use Icons for images on the desktop.
Stupid Thumbnails are all you can get.

I also customize my file type Context menus so I can quickly open the image in Photoshop or any alternate program.

For example .. In the attached W7 desktop …
find the animated clip.gif file .. and open it in Photoshop’s Image Ready .. With Two Clicks.

It’s just too much work to try to work with images in Vista or W7