Restoration and resizing questions.
Version:True Image Home 2011 (Update 2, build 6857)
Question 1:I have a Windows 7 machine with a 450GB HD that it boots from, currently 300GB used. I want to move some stuff off and restore to a far smaller disk (<60GB). When restoring can True Image shrink any volume by relocating files stored at higher clusters or can it only shrink down to the highest used cluster?
If it can't resize like that (wouldn't surprise me) is there another way to do what I want or do I have to bite the bullet and reinstall the OS and apps?
Question 2/3:In restore the boot volume from an image last week (on an external USB) I noticed two things:
a)When trying to restore under Win7 safe mode nothing happened. I got the warning about data being overwritten but then nothing happened.
b)I booted from a USB stick and it worked..but the UI portion (selecting files and target) was horribly slow. It took over fifteen minutes before I had finally got the restore going - surely that's not right?
As a general note TI has always seemed very slow on this machine. It's a 1.1GHz Atom with 1GB of RAM. I could understand the backup UI being slow because it is a bit short of RAM but I'm surprised that it was still slow when booting into your recovery utility.
Anyway thanks in advance for your responses.
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Andrue,
Dev-Anon gave you great advice: move all the files you don't want on your smaller disk off the disk you are backing up before your do the backup. Make sure you include *all* partitions of the disk (very often there are hidden partitions: system reserved, maybe recovery, etc.)
If you restore to an SSD disk, let us know, as proper alignment is important.
Always do your system restores from the CD/USB kit. It should work within Windows, but it will definitely work better in more cases from the CD/USB flash disk.
The UI from the CD/flash disk is different because it is a Linux version (basically of 2010). As you have noticed, the drive letters from the Linux version are not the same as in Windows. Pay attention to that.
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Pat L wrote:If you restore to an SSD disk, let us know, as proper alignment is important.
Good guess :).
I'd certainly appreciate any advice you have on that. Until I've finished copying files off I won't know what size I can go for but 60GB ought to do it otherwise it becomes prohibitively expensive.
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Try to leave all the programs that you have, the pagefile and of course windows folders on the SSD. If you cannot keep some big pgms (eg games), uninstall them before you backup.
60GB is pretty small. I went for 120GB and I have it half full with no big program installed (basic home stuff) except Adobe Premiere Pro.
Launch msinfo32.exe, go to components, storage, disks. For each partition on your system disk, look at the offset number. If the offset number is divisible by 4096 then your current disk is aligned.
When you restore, you'd better restore each partition individually, in the same order they were in windows (watch out not be confused by the changing drive letters, look at labels). Make sure that the first partition has 1MB before and has a whole number of MB as a size so that the offset of the following partition is still divisible by 4096.
If you have a system reserved partition, make sure you mark it active for restoration.
Once restored, check the disk alignment as described above.
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Pat L wrote:Try to leave all the programs that you have, the pagefile and of course windows folders on the SSD. If you cannot keep some big pgms (eg games), uninstall them before you backup.
I should be okay on that. It's actually a server (albeit one that only takes 6w of power) and there's not much on it except the OS and half a dozen server apps. The stuff I'm copying off is music and videos. Anyway I won't buy the SSD until I know the size, but good call.
Launch msinfo32.exe, go to components, storage, disks. For each partition on your system disk, look at the offset number. If the offset number is divisible by 4096 then your current disk is aligned.
Ah right, gotcha
Make sure that the first partition has 1MB before and has a whole number of MB as a size so that the offset of the following partition is still divisible by 4096.
Edit:Found this article which answered all my questions:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?57599-RAID-Non-R…
Thanks for your assistance :)
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Update:It worked. Server boots and everything seems good. Sadly no performance gain from migrating to SSD but that's because the machine (Fit-PC2) uses an IDE->SATA bridge which limits the speed below that of the original 2.5" HDD. Still - it should be more reliable and will use a bit less power.
As I noted though in my first post:The Acronis UI was appalling slow. It took over half an hour from booting off a USB stick to the start of restoration proper. The worst delay occurs when it's preparing to display pages that allow you to choose where to restore something. Ten minutes during which there's no hour glass and even the lock keys on my USB keyboard wouldn't toggle. The only thing suggesting the machine was still alive was the mouse cursor which could be moved.
It actually took longer to kick off the restore than the restore itself. I bet a lot of people would have given up and contacted support.
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