How to create an ISO image from a bootable thumb drive? (And how to partially clone a drive)

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I just got True Image Home 2010 (build 7046) and it's been working fine on my HP Envy 17 with Windows 7 Pro x64.  There are two things I haven't been able to figure out yet, one of which I'm pretty sure I should be able to do with this software.

  1. In the User Guide, the following statement appears: "Acronis True Image Home also provides the ability to create an ISO image of a bootable disc on the hard disk".  This is fairly important to me since I've created a bootable HP recovery thumb drive (using the software that came with the laptop) and it only allows you to create it once.  The instructions found on various forums for renaming hidden files no longer apply to the latest recovery partitions HP creates, so those don't help.  All I'd like to do is copy that thumb drive to various places, to make sure I have a good copy in case I ever need it.  Yes, I know I can also clone my system drive, but I'd like a bootable clean copy of the recovery partition, since that doesn't have all the changes I've made since I first booted.  My first choice is to make an ISO image of my bootable thumb drive, but I can't seem to find any software that will accomplish this (including True Image, which is supposed to be able to).  Once I have an ISO, I can burn some DVDs or do anything else I want with it.   In Acronis, I can clone a drive, but that doesn't create an ISO (and that doesn't allow me to create the set of 5 DVDs that it will take to hold this image).  I can back up a drive, but that doesn't seem to do what I want either.  Any ideas?
  2. I'm in the process of cloning my hard drive over to an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD.  The main reason I bought Acronis was because of its known ability to clone the system drive and work well with the issues that SSDs have.  The cloning operation is underway and seems to be going through great, but during the manual process, there didn't seem to be any way to skip over a partition that I didn't want included in the target drive.  HP creates a wasteful recovery partition that I don't really want on my SSD.  I could see ways to grow and shrink the partitions on the source drive (before they got cloned to the target), but this partition was full and I couldn't logically delete it from the list of partitions to clone.  Am I missing something?

Thanks!

PhotoDiver

Fr, 07/23/2010 - 21:27
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1) You've misinterpreted the feature being described. That section of the manual is covering the the creation or use of bootable media specifically for running Acronis True Image itself.  You have the option to burn a CD/DVD directly with the Bootable Media Builder and/or that feature to make and save an ISO of the bootable Acronis CD/DVD on your hard drive.  It's not a feature to somehow create ISO's of your hard drive partition itself. 

I think what you want is a way to safeguard your bootable thumb drive:  Just use True Image to create a full disk backup of the thumb drive itself, and save that image somewhere else (on another external drive.)  You can then use ATI to restore that disk image to another thumb drive, etc. at a later date.  It's also easy enough to test if it works: Use ATI to image your bootable thumb drive, restore the image to another thumb drive (even one of different size, as long as it's large enough for restoring a partition with space for current thumb drive's used space,) and make sure you can boot from it once it's created.

2) Be aware that the cloning of a HDD to SSD has other considerations that are very important, and might not work correctly using ATI depending on your scenario.  One big issue is the partition alignment.  See this posting (it can get a bit technical, but very important since if the SSD partitions are not aligned, and they won't be if you use ATI with the resize partition option, your SSD performance will suffer hugely.  http://forum.acronis.com/forum/3823 

I have not tried using ATI for disk cloning of Windows 7 or to an SSD drive.  I have, however, successfully used Acronis Disk Director to do this task, but I won't get into that here because it doesn't address the question as it relates to True Image functionality, and I can't answer your #2 question, but wanted to point you in the direction of more information.

Sa, 07/24/2010 - 21:33
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In TI terminology a clone means the entire physical drive, you can't leave out selected partitions. You can do this by making an image of the disk/partitions and then only restoring the ones you want.

You do have to be careful with SSD alignment of performance can drop to 50%. There are numerous posts about this on the forum.

Sa, 07/24/2010 - 23:13
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Howard and Seekforever: Thanks a ton for the helpful responses. I had read up a lot on SSD alignment and saw many posts in which Acronis seemed to take care of the alignment during the clone process. If that turns out to not be the case, I gather there are tools that can fix things up (and I'll read up some more before doing anything). Thanks again!

PhotoDiver

So, 07/25/2010 - 14:02
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