Clarification needed on 'where' an image file can be restored & why it fails.....
Hello,
I've used various versions of Acronis for years with great success, but I only used it to restore images back to the same HD that they were created on. Example: I have Win 7 and I get some malware so I restore my 7 image back to the same partition and HD it was made on. It has never failed to work that way.My main drive has 3 OS's on it , XPired, Win 7, and Linux/Ubuntu.
I was always under the assumption that if my HD failed and I had to get a new one, I could simply boot from the Acronis CD and install all my partition images onto the new HD, and be ready to go.
So as a test I connected an older, smaller HD and tried to restore some of my partitions ( not all of them as the drive is smaller ) to that test drive. I restored Win 7 and Ubuntu a total of 4 partitions, to the that drive.
The result was that 7 wouldn't boot immediately, I expect this because it was put on the original drive AFTER XP, so the boot info was on XP and I didn't restore XP. Using the install CD for 7 it made a new MBR and I was ready to go.
Now to Linux/Ubuntu:
Since Windows can't boot Linux, I have to use a program called EasyBCD to handle the booting of Ubuntu. It's installed in 7 and points to the "Grub" bootloader, in Ubuntu. In spite of everything being correct in that respect I could never get Ubuntu to boot without giving a "Grub Rescue" message on screen.
Was I mistaken thinking that I could install my backups to a new HD if this one goes south?
Or am I causing the trouble, by not restoring ALL the partitions to the new drive? Again, the test drive I am using is too small to allow me to restore ALL my partitions, so I only chose the 4 partitions I use the most just to see what would happen. Is not restoring ALL of them the cause of the trouble?Or should a get a larger drive and clone the original drive and not use images? I intend on not using XPired for much at all and it never is on the Web, but it needs to go! :D
I am not so naive to not know there are many things that keep information on partitions and HD's.
The MBR, the MFT, the Partition Table, UUID etc.
I didn't change the order of what I tried to restore from what it was originally, but again, I didn't restore them all.
Thank you all in advance!
F Wolf
HI Enchantech,
Thanks for the speedy reply.
I was hoping that Acronis would make the partitions the needed size on the 'test' disc. Apparently it can't do that. The solution to that is? Make partitions on the destination drive that match the existing one to the byte?
I am using ext4 for Linux and not trying to do flle leve operations as listed
Your point about the Metadata may well be the cause.
So at the end of the day if I get a new HD I can't restore any of my current data to that new drive?
Seems a bit disingenous to be able to restore only to the disc that the image was made from, imho.
Would I be better off making a clone of my current data to a new HD or won't that work either?
Regards
F Wolf
I believe that you should be able to use a new disk in place of a failed one and have success after all, that is one of the selling points of any backup software. I think maybe your problem stems from the fact that you used an OLD drive in your test.
Was this o;d drive clean of all data and prior formatting prior to your using in this test? If not I would suspect that fact as the problem. You should use either Windows Diskpart or Linux Gparted Utilities to clean the drive prior to attempting an OS restore on a previously used disk. Another consideration with recent HD is that of 4K Advanced Format drives, if your system has one of these drives installed and you attempt to restore an image of such a drive to an older non 4K drive this would invite failure.
I am not that familiar with Linux but it could be that Grub needs to repair its install much like Windows BCD in order to work again.
I believe that you should be able to use a new disk in place of a failed one and have success after all, that is one of the selling points of any backup software. I think maybe your problem stems from the fact that you used an OLD drive in your test.
Was this o;d drive clean of all data and prior formatting prior to your using in this test? If not I would suspect that fact as the problem. You should use either Windows Diskpart or Linux Gparted Utilities to clean the drive prior to attempting an OS restore on a previously used disk. Another consideration with recent HD is that of 4K Advanced Format drives, if your system has one of these drives installed and you attempt to restore an image of such a drive to an older non 4K drive this would invite failure.
I am not that familiar with Linux but it could be that Grub needs to repair its install much like Windows BCD in order to work again.
I agree that I 'should' be able to install to a brand new drive, but using the spare drive hasn't borne that idea out.
The older 'test drive' was cleaned using Gparted and one time it was left unallocated the other time it was formatted to EXT4. Seemed not to matter. I don't have a date when the drive was built, it's not from the '80's that's for sure lol. I will say I am not familiar with the term 4K Advanced Format. I don't kinow what my existing drive is aside from being a SATA, the older drive is of course SATA as well. I am betting they both are the same vintage give or take a few years.
My install of Linux has Grub on the same partition as the OS, that partition is "/" or "root". Normally when you dual boot windows & Grub, Grub wants to install itself to the Windows MBR, in so doing it puts itself in charge of booting both Windows and Linux. The trouble with that idea is that if a Linux update comes along and trashes Grub, you've lost BOTH OS's, you can't boot either one. With the system I used, the MBR is left alone to handle Windows and Grub simply boots Linux and nothing else. So if one fails you have the other to use in the meantime, a much better solution, imho.
I should mention that in my attempt to restore images of 7 and Linux, the information for both OS's was there, it's just that Linux wouldn't boot. Using the Linux / Ubuntu Live CD, that allows you to run Linux from the CD without installing it, I could easily see the original files were there from the restore i tried.
I thought it would be an easy task to restore Grub, had I been able to do that, my test would have succeeded. The only solution, for me at least who is no Linux expert, was to use a Boot Rescue CD to restore Grub. That worked, BUT it put Grub in the default location and overwrote the MBR. So as in my example it was in charge of booting Win 7 and Linux, not perfect but it did work to a degree, though not what I wanted.
Thanks and I will continue experimenting with it maybe get a new drive and see how that goes, this time making a clone rather than an image.
Dont forget if you ever decide to try Linux you can use the Live CD and run it from there without installing anything. Or you can install Linux 'beside' Windows in that case it runs like any other program and you can remove it using the Windows Control Panel. Running from the CD makes everything run slowly as you'd imagine and you can't save any changes, but you get to see the way the OS is laid out and how it works. Plus if you ever have a Windows crash and need certain files you can use the CD to see all your Windows files and transfer them out of Windows to another source using Linux. Windows can't see the Linux files at all but Linux can easily see the Windows ones, at times that alone can be a life saver!
Thanks!
Just to keep those following this up to date:
Yesterday I made a bull backup of all my partitions XP, &, & Ubuntu 14.04. My spare drive, which has 512kb sectors I found out, was the destination for the images. I used a formatting program called GParted to delete all the partitions on that drive and left the space unallocated. Then I proceeded to just install the partition backup that had 3 Ubuntu partitions on it. I did this for 2 reasons, it's a small amount of data to restore and wouldn't take a lot of time. I wanted to prove that you can use Acronis to restore one OS's partition(s) out of a group, and better yet see if it would allow a Linux / Ubuntu backup that would boot.
One by one I restored all 3 of the Ubuntu partitions, crossed my fingers and rebooted......... lo and behold it worked. the Grub bootloader appeared and the next thing I knew I was in my Ubuntu program with everything working as it does on my main drive.
So to prove the concept I'll have to start over and try and restore Ubuntu to this same drive again. Then try and restore XP, 7 and Ubuntu all at once and see what happens. Or just do 7 and Ubuntu, I know 7 won't boot right off the bat, the boot information for 7 is in XP so I will have to use the 7 install disc to rebulld the MBR. Then install EasyBCD into 7 to let the MBR know where to find the Ubuntu bootloader.
I DID make the partition backups using the Acronis recovery disc, normally I create backups from the installed version of TIH. I do recall seeing a choice of what sort of drive do I want to create, it was on the same window that asks you a location for the backup. I DID change the default to make the drive a system drive, I know I have never done that before (duh) maybe that was the change that made it work. But from now on I'll pay more attention when I am restoring an OS. Maybe I was missing that choice all along and the root cause was the user, NOT Acronis!
Regards to all,
F wolf
I would like to point out that instead of restoring partitions, the safest thing in my experience is to perform disk backups. I suggest that in the event of a hard drive failure, you would not find a smaller hard drive to replace the dead one. So you would be able to restore the entire disk onto a replacement drive without issue. Hard drives are cheap ... grab one and give it a try.