Cannot do a bare-metal restore with True Image 2011 and Win7 x64
I'm at my wits end with True Image as I still cannot do a bare metal restore with version 2011.
First a short bit of history. I've been a user of TI since ver. 7 or so. It has saved me countless times... until Win7. I bought a new Win7 x64 machine a year ago and quickly found that TI ver 11 would not work. So I bought TI 2010. It installed okay but it was incapable of performing a bare metal restore. I worked with Acronis tech support for over 6 months during which they sent me countless fixes to try. They finally sent me a version that worked perfectly and I was able to do a bare metal restore. I was excited and asked when they would roll-out the fix. They said the fix would be incorporated in the Sept. release of a patch for TI2010. September came and the patch was never released and in the meantime Acronis released version TI2011. I continue to use the beta 2010 they sent me.
Fast forward to the present... I purchased a second Win7 x64 computer a month ago and also purchased a copy of TI 2011 (despite the reports about the horrible interface). It installed fine and seems to run. However, I cannot do a bare metal restore. I install a new bare C-drive, boot from Acronis CD and do a complete restore. Upon reboot all I get is a C: prompt and some kind of RAMdisk partition. I tried it several times with the same results.
So I dig out my old beta 2010 TI CD that Acronis sent me a year ago and viola... it performs a bare metal restore just fine.
By the way, my method of testing bare metal restore is to first do a full backup of C:, then I install a brand new C-drive that is identical to my original (500GB Seagate in this case). I then boot from the Acronis Recovery CD, select my full backup, and restore the entire disk. I then remove the CD and reboot.
This whole thing is driving me crazy. Why is it so hard for Acronis to release a version of TI that can do a bare metal restore? Me and all my co-workers use TI ver 11 at work for our XP laptops and most have had hard drives fail and in each case TI 11 quickly did a bare metal restore to a new drive and had them back up and running in no time.
I feel like I'm wasting my time and money by purchasing True Image and should just stick with the built-in Windows 7 backup and restore utility.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
Good afternoon. I will take another look.
My reference to the C-drive is my old-school way of saying boot drive. :-) When I backup the system I select the entire drive which includes all the partitions. I seem to recall my drives contain three partitions (Diag, Recovery and something else). I'm at the office now but will double check when I get home. Both of my systems are Dell Precision workstations, a T1500 and T1600. They both have Win7 x64 as it was preloaded by Dell.
The advice to check the partitions via Windows Disk Management is fine - as long as your system is working. But what if my drive had failed. For previous versions of True Image I did not need to know all the details. I simply backed up my entire drive (DRIVE-1 for example) which imaged the drive and all existing partitions. I didn't know how many there were nor did I care. When it came time for a bare-metal restore I simply installed a new hard disk of equal-to or larger size and told True Image to restore the entire disk - and it automatically recreated all the partitions. Again, it simply re-created my original partition layout regardless.
I did try selecting "Recover Disk Signature" and it did not make any difference.
I did notice that with 2011, during the restore it asked me questions about partition 1-1, 1-2, Windows and MBR (not sure about that third one, I know it wasnt a number). Again... why? Why can't I simply choose to restore all the partitions exactly as they were before?
I'm still willing to entertain the notion that there is some choice during the restore that I answered incorrectly. But then again, when I used my 2010 Recovery CD everything worked just fine and I didn't need to answer all the partition questions during the restore.
When you recover with the 2011 CD, you have the choice of selecting any partition and/or the MBR+track0, or selecting everything (the check box at the disk level).
When you restore to a bigger disk and select the entire disk, ATI will try to scale the size of the partitions, that might create some problems.
Best way to proceed when you restore to a bigger disk is to restore one partition at a time, resizing only the user partition(s) to take advantage of the bigger size.
The only things to specify are:
- for each partition, the new destination is the new drive,
- mark active the right partition,
- do not change the drive letter.
Finally, you restore the MBR+track0 and the disk signature.
That should work.
I got home from work and gave this a try. I used "add Disk" to remove all the partitions from my test disk. Then I chose the entire disk while on the "disk view" screen. I chose my new drive as the destination and off it goes. When completed I removed my recovery CD and rebooted. Everything looked good until it hit the boot drive and displayed "Invalid Partition Table".
Not sure what else I can try... Source disk - Target disk - GO. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
By the way, after trying it twice and getting "Invalid Partition Table" both times, I tossed in my TI2010 recovery CD and restored my TI2010 image from yesterday and the drive booted perfectly. I **was** going to try restoring my TI2011 image using the TI2010 CD but it refused to open the file. I assume Acronis has chosen to change the format of the image yet again.
As you discovered, you cannot use an older CD to restore a backup of a newer version.
Your procedure was correct for a disk restore and as you may have noticed, the CD disk restore procedure was mostly the same as with all the versions you have tried. However, I do suggest that you always checkmark the "Recover disk signature" when creating a new disk. This option is on the same screen as when you select the target disk. Some software such as Acronis, Adobe and others use that information for identification. Without that info, you may have to reinstall a program or loose options when upgrading versions. Just to be safe, when restoring to a new disk, this should be done.
It may not be a factor but I would check the old disk for disk errors and try creating a new backup using he 2011 CD.
I did notice that with 2011, during the restore it asked me questions about partition 1-1, 1-2, Windows and MBR (not sure about that third one, I know it wasn't a number). Again... why? Why can't I simply choose to restore all the partitions exactly as they were before?
The 2009-2010-2011 Recovery CD's are pretty much the same. You only get asked the partiton1-1, 1-2, etc questions when performing a restore which is not a disk restore. You did not get that option asked on your last restore of either 2010 or 2011 because a disk restore does basically duplicate what what you have--especially when the target disk is the same size.
The advice to check the partitions via Windows Disk Management is fine - as long as your system is working. But what if my drive had failed. For previous versions of True Image I did not need to know all the details.
If you are doing a disk option backup and a disk option restore, the user really does not need to know the partition arrangement; however, if you need to do any resizing or restore partitions back individually, then this information can be important for successful duplication. TrueImage does provide the capability to determine that information from a disk option backup but user has to know where and how to look. This information can be manipulated via the columns icon located in upper right corner of the screen where you choose the type backup to be created or the when deciding what partitions are to be restored. Check back here later and I will post an example.See attachment below.
Addendum1: If you had the time and willingness, it would be interesting to do a test of another bare metal disk restore except this time, use the 2011 CD but restore a 2010 backup. One solution to a failed restore which will not boot is to do a repair using a Windows 7 install disk or a win7 repair disk made by the user. When doing a repair, the repair option only fixes one problem at a time so the user may need to repeat the repair several times in order to get a full repair.
Addendum2:This is an example of how to get disk partition information from a disk option backup. When the Windows Disk Management graphical view is not available, the same information and more is available from within the backup providing the backup included all partitions. This illustration is included in most all my guides. The user must dig for the information but the information is there for retrieval.
Click to enlarge
Good news! I finally got it to work. I'm not sure what I was doing wrong but I started over, erased my new drive, did a disk-level backup and a disk-level restore and the system booted fine from the restored drive.
I appreciate you hanging in there with me. :-)
- John