Questions about backup/restore of Dell Inspiron
Hello
I've had great success using Acronis 10 to backup and restore my desktop and now I've got friends with a Dell Inspiron notebook running Vista, who are interested in using it.
In perusing the forums I see references occasionally to problems with notebooks due to some manufacturers installing recovery partitions or maybe just specializing the hard drive in some way.
Can anyone tell me if I should run into problems with this notebook's restore?
I plan to create a recovery disk first then run from it and do a full system backup to an external drive they have. Still running from the recovery disk I next want to recover the system onto an empty, new hard drive which I will eventually use to replace the existing system drive just to test the recovery.
Does that sound like it will work OK?
Frank Smart
If my dell system has 3 partitions, 2 of them are custom dell restore and diagnostics, and the other one is the main "C" partition; can we just backup and restore the "C" partition? Afterall, that is the important data.
Well you can, just ignore the "Fat 16" partitions, which are your dell partitions...
however i suggest to backup of complete HDD.. including dell partitions, though u always have option to recover only 1 partition (c:)
I was told that ati 2011 won't correctly restore a dell mbr and partition table. There will be all sorts of boot problems because of non-standard partition descriptors. so perhaps it would be best to just restore the "C" partition and not the mbr and not the other partitions?
well if you will restore only C:, how will boot your system?
just in case you are doin so, you need to rebuilt mbr followin the microsoft kb article to fixmbr or rebuild mbr
Acronis is an application which can do wonders.. depends how you play with it ..
Assume for the moment that some applications on the C: drive got mis-configured. Like for example a bunch of photoshop plugins. Instead of re-installing each individual one. Why not restore the C: partition. And just the C: partition. Because, afterall, the systems still boots fine.
Well if you are using ATI Home 2011, you can take back of application as well..
Also, I still believe system restore is still a power full toll..
Now restore scenarios may differ depending upon the issues you are facing.. First try to localize the issue.. analyze.. is it your application, is your OS, what will happen if you made a mistake in restore or improper restore, do you have Data backup before formating HDD..
there is always 2 way of doing things.. smart way & hard way.. re-imaging hard drive may or may not be smart way of resolving issue, depending upon the downtime & criticality..
though i m familiar with Acronis.. but i wont simply go & restore my system.. since we forgot that.. while doing restore to repair one application, we might lose data & configuration of other, for which we didnt had back or any recent file we created & havent backed-up.. in such senarios, think.. can i reinstall this plugin.. it might take 1 min to download & 5 mins to install rather restoring 100GB hdd image..
I hope I answered ur question :)