Losing a little confidence
I have used TI for years and it has saved my bacon so many times. I have recently upgraded my machine to Win8 64bit with a Corsair Neutron 250GB SSD as my C:\ drive and a Seagate Barracuda 2TB as my D:\ drive. Stupidly I reset the UEFI/BIOS to Optimized Defaults which of course disabled the AHCI setting which enables an SSD to run correctly, which my techie failed to pick up, as did I, but that's what I pay him for. He replaced the SSD with a slightly faster model and re-installed Windows.
I took the machine back to my Home/Office and promptly imaged the C:\ partition to D:\ as an insurance. There is also an H:\ partition which the techie tells me is a recovery partition for Win 8, about 300MB and I assume it is part of the physical C:\ drive. TI suggested I backed that up as well, which either I didn't notice or wasn't an option as I imaged from my rescue disc without TI being installed on the HDD. The image completed and verified without a hitch, I then restored it and it failed, telling me to insert the Win 8 disc to repair the Win 8 installation, which I did and that worked so I am back to a Win 8 installation which is working fine.
To install all my software with activations and configurations, they are mostly upgrades, takes two days with 20 digit keys and companies refusing to believe that I am re-installing on the same machine, hence my affection for TI.
So, my questions are, what did I do wrong? Should the H:\ partition be restored as well? Should TI be installed on the HDD before making an image? Is it better to install TI in Safe Mode? When and if should MBR and Disc Signature be invoked,
Thanking you volunteers for your time in helping we who are less capable than you.
Thank you for your trouble. I have attached my Disk Management snapshot. Sadly, a restore of my previous setup did not work so I am rebuilding my system and making images as I go, as insurance I tried a restore yesterday of the C:\ drive only, I left the reserved H:\ drive well alone, I reasoned if it didn't work I still had the option of restoring the H:\ drive as well, I chose to restore the MBR and disk signature and it all worked perfectly. It's frustrating that all the drives get renamed during a restore. It appears to me that restoring to a different drive/disk than the one the image was made from is fraught with problems, unless it is just my ignorance. Perhaps an Acronis tech could advise when/if the reserve partition be restored, if there was a complete HDD collapse and a new HDD installed surely it would contain erroneous information, I suppose if the current HDD became corrupted but was physically OK then a restore of the reserved partition would be necessary. This is a very important question as data loss and two days of work are involved.
Thank you again for your help.
Thank you for your input. When I restore an image after booting from the Acronis rescue disc I am offered the choice of restoring the reserved partition, do I restore the reserved partition as well? I have just made an image and then restored to the same disc without restoring the reserved partition and all is working perfectly so why does TI strongly recommend imaging the reserved partition as well. Also, should I choose to restore the MBR and disc signature when restoring to the same disc. If my C: drive went bad can I restore my current image to a new disc? Would I use Clone or Restore? In either case what would I do about restoring the MBR and disc signature? Why oh why does TI jumble up all the drive letters whilst I am configuring a restore
Regards,
Peter
Win 8 64bit
C:\ 240gb SSD
D:\ 2TB HDD
True Image 2013
Because of the issues with your system described in the first post, your "System Reserved" partition is not being used as such any more, and is seen on the system as a normal data partition with a drive letter. When you reinstalled Windows 8 to your system, I would assume that you didn't delete the existing partitions and had Windows 8 install into the space occupied by the "C" drive. Since the space occupied by the existing "H" drive was still present, Windows 8 installed itself without using a "System Reserved" partition and made the 2nd partition (the "C") on your drive both the active partition, and the partition that contains the boot files, as well as the system files. This is not how Windows 8 normally would be installed.
If you had installed Windows 8 onto a completely blank (un-allocated) hard disk, you would not have seen (in Windows Explorer) the "System Reserved" partition since no drive letter would have been assigned to it. You would still see it in Windows Disk Management though. See attached screen capture of my Windows 8 system disk. It has the System Reserved (with no drive letter and is active), the "OS" and a "data" partitions. The data partition is optional.
To answer your questions:
Normally, on a system that uses the default Windows 8 installation (2 two partitions - the "System Reserved" and the "OS") both partitions would need to be backed up to be able to have a successful restore. The MBR/Track 0 and Disk Signature are backed up any time you back up a full disk or a disk partition.
The reason both normally need to be included, is that Windows uses the "System Reserved" partition as the active partition and it is used for the BCD store (for booting), Windows Recovery Environment, and for Bit Locker for those Windows editions that support it. The "C" drive would then contain the boot files and the operating system (OS).
In your case, Windows is using only the "C" partition on your drive to boot, as it is the active system boot partition.
If you were to restore just your "C" partition to a new un-allocated drive, you would need to run the Windows 8 Startup Repair to correct the BCD entries since they would be point to a non-existent second partition on your drive since the first partition "H" would be missing. Your hard disk then would only have just your OS partition and would be okay set up that way.
You would also need to restore the MBR/Track 0 to a un-allocated disk so that the disk could be seen as a bootable drive.
The Disk Signature restore is optional, but recommended if restoring back to the same drive or a different drive that is being used as a replacement for your primary drive.
Windows will disable one of your disks if there is a Disk Signature conflict as the signatures for each disk must be unique.
On **your** system, if you backup the "C" drive (including automatically, the MBR/track 0 and Disk Signature), and restore just the "C" drive into the space occupied by your "C" drive, and there are no MBR problems, the MBR/track 0 restore is not necessary. The "H" drive is not used by Windows on **your** system, so restoring it would not be necessary, but it would still need to be in place for proper booting as referenced above.
The drive letter issue when booted to the Rescue Media is explained here: http://kb.acronis.com/content/1519. You should always assign meaningful names to your partitions so that during restore, they are easily identified by name and sizes.
You have two choices at this point.
First and recommended:
Install Windows 8 again and have Windows 8 clean off the disk as part of the install (advanced options when selecting the location to install to - deleting all the existing partitions). This will create the standard 350MB "System Reserved" partition automatically, as well as the OS partition.
When backing up this installation, both the "System Reserved" partition (will have no drive letter assigned) and the OS partition would need to be backed up to have the ability to restore from your backup image to a new blank disk.
Second,
You could create a full disk backup of all the partition's on your disk, and then from the Acronis Rescue Media, choose the tool "Add a new disk" and clean (initialize) your disk using MBR to create a blank hard disk and then restore only the "C" drive and the MBR/track 0 and Disk Signature.
Your system may not boot at first after this restore, but you could then boot to Windows 8 installation media and perform a Startup Repair (this may take several tries to complete all the repairs to the BCD).
Once your system boots with only the OS partition, you could create a new full disk backup image that would be able to be restored to a unallocated (new or replacement disk) without any boot issues. You would not be able to use Bit Locker in this configuration, and would not have the "H" drive space being wasted as a "data" partition in front of your Windows installation.
I'd find another "techie" person, as his re-installation of Windows 8 into the 2nd partition on your drive has created the confusion over the "System Reserved" partition, and he should have wiped the new SSD first before installing onto the drive. The "H" drive should never have been assigned a drive letter. I hope you didn't pay him/her much.
Thank you James for the in-depth analysis of my problem. I really appreciate the time you have taken. My apologies for posting again but I thought you had given up on my problem. I have printed out your reply and shall show it to a new techie when I find one. I shall not attempt to fix it myself, I couldn't bear to have it go wrong and have another few days of installing and configuring. What would we do without you volunteers, I run my own small business and don't think I could spare the time to advise others. I have renamed my drives to aid in identification when restoring.
Thank you again.
Peter
Your welcome,
Be sure you create a full disk backup of your system "as is" including all the partitions.
If you need to restore to a new disk, or wish to wipe your existing drive before restoring, you would need to restore both the "H" drive and the OS partition in that order, and be sure to mark the OS partition as the active partition during the restore process.
You would also need to restore the MBR and Disk Signature to a new or freshly wiped drive for it to boot properly.
James