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Help with restoring a Win7 Home Premium 64 bit laptop

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I used Acronis 11 to make a backup of a Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit laptop. Can I use this to restore the hard drive on this laptop using Acronis 2012 and the Image I took of C drive with version 11. There is a recovery partition that is did not image. I am having some issues with Media Center Crashing and I have already done an upgrade install with no improvement. I would like to store an image of the laptop as it is using 2012 but I really want to know what I am doing before I do this. I have had zero luck restoring anything with Win 7 operating system. I really need to get me a spare hard drive to play with imaging before I screw things up for good. I have an old version of Windows Home Server and like most things it backs up the OS up but does not have the drivers to make it restore the image.

Perry

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Perry Gray wrote:
the Image I took of C drive with version 11.

That suggests to me that you did not backup the entire disk. Backing up only the C: partition is risky because often it does not contain the boot files. Boot files are often on a hidden partition such as System Reserved.

Create a full disk mode Backup, selecting the checkbox for the entire disk (not just individual partitions). That ensures that you have everything you need, and you won't need to understand how the disk is laid out with possible hidden partitions. A full disk mode Backup captures everything, and is the simplest, safest backup method.

Yes, ATI 2012 can restore images made with ATI 2011, and in fact many previous versions. When restoring disks or partitions, boot from the ATI bootable Rescue Media.

Well it boots ok it just won't load media center. Well I removed the disk from the laptop and installed it in this machine. Explorer finds the drive but 2012 won't find it when I try to select a destination disk. How the hell does it know which disk I want to restore to and deliberately does not show the drive?

Perry

Have you tried the fix below to correct the Windows Media Center issue you have?

1. Open Control Panel/Programs and Features.
2. Click "Turn Windows features on or off" in the left pane.
3. Expand "Media Features", uncheck "Windows Media Center". Click "Yes" to continue, and click OK to quit. Then Restart.

Note: You may need to re-configure settings for Windows Media Center after re-enabling it.

4. Open "Turn Windows features on or off" again. Turn on the features "Windows Media Player" and "Windows Media Center". Restart.

Well I am screwed now. 2012 wiped out the boot partition when I did a restore. I thought it would only restore the C: partition not wipe the whole drive. What is in the boot partition and why does it exist. I am use to XP. Can I just restore things using the Dell disks or will they even add a boot partition?

Perry

Yeah I tried this fix. It did not work.

Perry

James F wrote:

Have you tried the fix below to correct the Windows Media Center issue you have?

1. Open Control Panel/Programs and Features.
2. Click "Turn Windows features on or off" in the left pane.
3. Expand "Media Features", uncheck "Windows Media Center". Click "Yes" to continue, and click OK to quit. Then Restart.

Note: You may need to re-configure settings for Windows Media Center after re-enabling it.

4. Open "Turn Windows features on or off" again. Turn on the features "Windows Media Player" and "Windows Media Center". Restart.

You can indeed restore just a single partition and leave the other partitions untouched. But, it is also possible to wipe out a disk entirely using True Image (or any imaging/restoring application) if you're not careful about what you're doing.

If you still have a valid backup image (.tib) you can restore again. But, as I wrote earlier, it depends upon what you backed up. A backup of just C: is nowhere near as good as an entire disk backup.

Dell's utility will work, but would restore the PC to its factory state without your user data or applications you installed.

Well if it is just the boot info in the recovery partition then the program configuration should be in the C: partition. Ok so let's say I restore the disk to the factory state then backup the boot partition can I restore that to one partition and the C: to another partition? This should get me back where I was assuming the boot partition is not changed buy installing programs etc.

Perry

Does the PC boot or not?
If not, you can use a Win7 repair disk to create the required boot files and render the system bootable.

No it does not boot. It says bootloader missing. So I get it bootable then how do I restore C: drive without hosing the boot partition again?

Perry

You would select only the OS partition to restore from the backup, and restore to the same partition on the PC.
You should restore by booting from the ATI bootable Rescue Media.

But, warning: the ATI bootable Rescue Media is Linux-based, so it enumerates partitions differently from Windows. What is enumerated as C: in Windows may be a different letter when seen by the Rescue Media. That's why it's important to explicitly name/label every non-hidden partition, so you can identify them by their names rather than their lettering.

I am using 2012 which so far I don't like the interface of. I installed the disk in my main computer and restored it from there. I restored to the OS partition not to the boot partition and it wiped out the boot partition.

Perry

I made a cut-and-paste error. I didn't mean to say "2013", as my statements apply equally to all versions of the bootable Rescue Media. Disk or partition restores should be performed only from the ATI bootable Rescue Media.

It is certainly possible to restore just the OS partition (C: in Windows) to the same partition. I have done it often, with Windows 7 64-bit and other Windows versions. If you wiped out the boot partition as well, then you did something wrong. I suspect you may have either restored the wrong partition or selected the wrong target partition destination. That is easily done if you don't name/label all volumes as I suggested.

Here's one of Grover's guides, on restoring C: partition: http://forum.acronis.com/sites/default/files/mvp/user285/guides/tih2012…

Ok I fixed the problem by booting to a win 7 install disk. I went to repair and it saw the existing OS and then I did a boot repair. This fixed it and it is working fine now. It maybe easier to just restore and then run the Win 7 install disk than trying to figure out partitions. I do want to repartition the hard drive so 100G or so is in C: and the rest is in D:

Perry

Perry Gray wrote:
than trying to figure out partitions.

That's the advantage of creating a full disk mode Backups, selecting the checkbox for the entire disk (not just individual partitions). That ensures that you have everything you need, and you won't need to understand how the disk is laid out with possible hidden partitions. A full disk mode Backup captures everything, and is the simplest, safest backup method.

As for partitioning, I did something similar to what you're considering. I partitioned the drive into C: for OS, D: for my user files; and E: for music files. I create full disk mode Backups, but often exclude music files by file extension (as they take up over 400 GB) to reduce the size and time of the True Image backups. I supplement those with file-based backups of the music files using Robocopy.
On several occasions I've restored just the C: partition, leaving the data and music partitions untouched.

Hi, got here late but wanted to ask a question related to the boot partition.

I've got a Win8 machine, which I assume is similar to Win7 in that is has a system (boot) partition in addition to the regular C: OS partition.

I imaged the boot partition when the machine was new, do I have to continually image that partition over time to keep up with it possibly changing, or is it static code that should never change? In other words, if that partition ever gets corrupted is my original image always going to work for restoring it?

thanks,

Doug

You don't have to but imaging the whole disk might make your like easier than mine was. The boot partition evidently does not communicate with the OS partition. If it did then what I did with the Win 7 disk would not have worked. I just figured out how to get my Windows home server backups to restore a Win 7 machine. So acronis is a backup to my backup.

Perry

As Perry and I discussed, it's always safest to perform full disk mode Backups. Sure, you may be including a separate boot partition that doesn't change from backup to backup, but typically that's not a large partition anyway.