Bootable recovery partiton

Hopefully, you have already created an Entire Disk Image backup of the drive in its current state.

It sounds like you're wanting to use the ASRM. This would allow you to press F11 at bootup to boot into TI. From there, you could do the restore. You would need to create a partition for the images or use the SZ. Note that TI no longer boots from the SZ. Instead, it boots from the Windows partition. This means that the Windows partition must be accessible to use the ASRM.

These options are in the Tools & Utilities section of TI: Acronis Startup Recovery Manager and Manage Acronis Secure Zone

Before doing that, it would be good to know for sure that TI boots okay from the CD (or a flashdrive) and can successfully see the drives and validate your backup image. Have you tested this?

If you don't want to use the ASRM, a different method can be used. For example, I use Grub4DOS to boot to another partition and load TI from there.

Thanks for replying, As of yet I haven't created imgaes or anything, The recovery partition idea just came to me last night.

Is there a step by step process to accomplish this in the help documentation?

As for booting CD (or a flashdrive) I'm trying to avoid having to lug around a external CD drive. Like I said USB is a last resort if I can't to the Boot from the HDD Partition.

BTW what is "SZ"

ASRM = Acronis Startup Recovery Manager
SZ = Secure Zone

If you want to use the ASRM, you just need to activate it in TI. It's your choice if you want to use the SZ or a different partition for the backup images. For the backup tasks (scheduled or manual), select the SZ or the partition as the destination. Information on the ASRM and the SZ can be found in the TI manual. You may also want to check out some of Grover's guides and helpful links if you're new to TI.

However, as I said, make sure that the flashdrive (or CD) can boot successfully to TI and see all the drives correctly. This is the same version of TI that loads if you use the ASRM. It should also be able to successfully validate your backup image.

The SZ or partition needs to be large enough to hold the backups you want. If possible, I would make it large enough to hold several Full images with some space left over for some Incrementals/Differentials.

After reviewing the Documentation for ASRM it seems that the best approach (as you suggested) would be to create the Images in and place them on the HDD on a dedcated partiton and use ASRM to revocer in the event of failure. Correct. I will try to test this method tonight.