Topic: Acronis True Image - excellent HDD imaging software

[Cobra951]

This will sound like spam.  I am that impressed and relieved.  Apologies in advance.

I have a new favorite program, and nothing but praise for its creators.  Acronis True Image surpasses Norton Ghost 9 in every way.  It just does its job with (so far) perfect results, and a minimum of confusion.  You install it, let it scan your drives, and then just pick stuff to back up.  while it can do conventional data backups, the real meat is of course full HDD or partition images.  Like Ghost 9, this program can image the system drive from the system, which if done wrong can lead to weird problems.  The restore component is equally robust.  You burn a bootable CD with the GUI-based management tools, swap out the drive to replace, (make CD boot 1st in Setup if need be,) boot up with the CD, and up it pops.  It saw the 3 external HDDs as well as the 2 internal ones, so I could have saved the backup image to an external (but I didn't trust that would work up front).

As you know if you've seen my latest thread in the Help forum, I had my system drive crash not long ago.  I reformatted it and spent days getting everything to an agreeable state again.  I've been keeping an eye on the event viewer, not trusting the drive anymore, and it paid off.  Today I get an IO_ERR_BAD_BLOCK.  A chkdsk /f/v/r fixed a bunch of bad clusters, and after that, it just had to go.  Transferring the D: system partition to a spare HDD went very smoothly.  The image files, which I stored on C:, are about 4 GB each by default, so I burned them to DVD-Rs as well.  Windows came up as if nothing had happened.  The only extra thing it did was pop up a balloon about the new(er) WD drive which replaced the dying Maxtor (18,537 hours of use, according to SeaTools, which also indicated the drive fails their long test).

So, after another harrowing afternoon with old rickety hardware, I'm breathing normally again, for now.  I've placed the Acronis rescue CD and the 2 image DVDs together with the rest of my system's installation CDs.  If it happens again, I think I'm ready.  Now, about the C: drive . . .

Edit:  Here's a descriptive review.

Wiki's take

[beo]

used to use acronis snap deploy myself - which is pretty much an extension of the same piece of software. instead of just making backups, it enables you to rollout drive images to an entire networks worth of machines.

i had to get a 30 laptops ready to go out on the road, so i got one machine set up with all programs, updates, security etc. imaged the drive and then sent it out to all laptops at once over a network switch. the rollout for all machines took about 5 minutes!

i'd then do one updated image every month, so when a laptop came back in, it'd be ready to go within a couple of minutes.

after i did the initial rollout and everything just worked i spent a couple of weeks dossing about on the internet because i'd just cut my workload by about 90%.

if you can't tell, i was very impressed too.

[ren]

With this program could I mirror my laptop hard drive to an external, upgrade the laptop hard drive and then copy from the external back to the laptop. If not, what could?

I'm a bit weary of what happens when I have a new hard drive with no operating system in my computer.

[Cobra951]

Yes, you can do exactly that.  I recommend a dry run first:

(1) Install software
(2) Create bootable restore CD with the software
(3) Image your HDD to external drive
(4) Go into your laptop's setup (F2 while booting up in mine) and make CD boot first
(5) Boot up with CD you created
(6) Does it see the external drive and the new image files on it?

If it all works well, do what you want for real.

Edit:  A couple of notes:  When you boot up from a CD this way, you don't need a hard drive with an OS on it.  The CD has the limited OS you will need for this purpose, namely restoring the original HDD's image from the files the software created on your external drive.  Then you can make the HDD boot first again, and all should be as it was, except your partition will be the whole size of your new HDD.  (If you have more than one partition on the drive, their sizes will increase proportionately.  Think stretching an image.)

[ren]

If that worked, could I boot from the external hard drive and then copy the image to the blank internal one?

or do I need to do what the bottom of this link says and plug the laptop hard drive into a desktop to copy the image?

[Cobra951]

No.  The software will create a bootable CD for you.  It contains all you need to restore the image files on the external to the new, blank HDD.  You don't boot from anywhere else.  You just need to tell your PC's Setup to make the CD drive boot first, ahead of the HDD.

Edit:  In case it's still confusing, after above steps:

(7) Replace laptop's internal HDD with the new one.
(8 ) Boot up with Acronis restore CD you created.
(9) Restore image files from external drive to internal drive
(10) Boot up without CD
(11) All should be as it was, except you have a lot more free space.

If you want, make HDD boot first again, if you feel so inclined.  No rush.

Edit: oh, and . . .
(12) Slip old HDD lovingly into new one's protective bag.  Store it somewhere safe.  It's an ideal backup, at least for a while.

[ren]

Gotcha. Thanks a lot for the help.

[Cobra951]

You bet.  Hope it all goes well.

[ren]

I'm having a bit of a problem. I copied the image file on the external onto the new hard drive just fine but nothing happens. When I turn the computer on without the cd in I just get a black screen with a flashing underscore.

The only thing I could think of was that I didn't partition the new drive since the demo version of Acronis doesn't let you do that. Google tells me that you don't need to partition when you're copying an image over though.

Any thoughts?

Edit:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/967/1/
The bottom of this review says

Since there is no labeling about this jumper on the drive and information about the jumper is hard to find it can be frustrating if you are having issues setting one of these drives up in your notebook and find that you encounter issues. Having the jumper installed will force the drive to operate in the 1.5Gb/s mode, which is needed on select notebooks like the Thinkpad T61p. This is due to the fact some older 1.5Gbits/sec SATA cards do not support auto negotiation with newer 3.0Gbits/sec drives. Systems using older SATA host adapters may stop responding during boot or may respond with a “drive not detected” error. If this happens on your notebook while trying to upgrade to one of these drives just place a two-pin jumper (not included with the drive) onto the two left pins of the jumper block and the errors should go away.

Does that make sense considering I was able to transfer data to the hard drive without any problems?

[Cobra951]

I have no knowledge of the demo's behavior.  Sorry.  If it allows unrestricted image transfer, it should work.

Hardware issues are something else entirely.  When I tried moving a DVD-R drive from a PCI-to-IDE card (which hasn't been recognized by Windows since I had the HDD crash) to the slave slot of the 2nd IDE channel, the PC locked up with random color blocks on the screen, before it even got into trying to boot Windows.  I decided to punt on that issue for now, just so I could get my system up and running again.  I'm sure it's some jumper problem.

You're sure you did a sector-by-sector drive image, right?  I'll give this some thought, but right now, I can't think of what else could be tripping you up.

[ren]

I tried the whole process from the top and it isn't working. I'm just going to try and install Windows on it the regular way.

[Cobra951]

The only other thing that occurs to me is a small system-type partition I've seen on one laptop.  I mean really small, like in the MB range rather than GB.  If the demo software can't do partitions, then it would fail, since it would need to deal with both the C: partition and the small one (which doesn't even have a drive letter on this one VAIO).

Regardless, I'm sorry it isn't working for you.  I have no experience with the demo or its limitations, so I can't speak for or against it.