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Acronis 2010 and backing up Windows 7 hidden partition

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Hi all,

Just wanted to ask the best way to deal with the 200mb Windows 7 hidden system partition when W7 is installed.

At the moment I am backing up the system partition and this re-instals fine.

But I was thinking that if I had a total hard drive crash, and the hidden W7 partition was not backed up too, would this restrict the re-loading of the image to a brand new un-partitioned hard drive?

I have read that some elements of the MBR are actually stored to this hidden partition and if it is missing, and even if a valid image was re-installed, it would not boot.

Should I include this (hidden partition) when I do a full system backup? IE select this partition in addition to the system partition? And shoudl the MBR be done as well? The manual does not have a lot of reference to Windows 7 procedures.

Thanks

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Miden,
This post may be of interest. The overall discussion is applicable to your situation.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/7239

Thanks Grover.

I have now run a "One Click Backup" but when/if I do a recovery using this, which of the three boxes do I tick if I was installing to a new/freshly formatted hard drive?

My hard drive is partitioned into two partitions, the D: drive is all my data.

The options given by Acronis are NTFS (PROGRAMS) (C:)
MBR and TRACK 0
NTFS (System Reserved)
This last one is the "hidden"partition the Windows 7 installs automatically.

OR would I just tick all three to fully re-instal to a new hard drive/ partition?

Thanks
Dennis

Hi Dennis,
Suggest you study the link referenced above. It answers most of your questions. My usage of TrueImage Home is to do full disk option backups. I do not use TI for data files only type backups. I want all partitions in my backup.

If you are moving to a new drive, the have two (or more) choices.
1. You can check mark the disk option restore which will complete duplicate the old disk onto the new disk and the new disk will be the same capacity as the old disk. Any difference in size will be displayed as unallocated space. I am not familiar with the options of Win7 but I understand its disk utility will enable you to add the unallocated space to your existing partitions. Or, you can use any other Disk partitioning utility to achieve the same thing.
2. Or, if you do not wish to use the disk option restore, you can restore each partition individually and resize each partition individually. This posting below by Support gives you the general idea.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/7131#comment-15910
3. If you need to restore only your C drive or only your data drive (where a new disk is not involved), then you can optionally restore only the partitions which you wish to update.
4. My signature index has several guides in item 7 which could be helpful. These are the older version but the basic premise is still the same.

I've always deleted this hidden partition (when it was installed by setup). After that i repaired the MBR with the Win7-DVD and it's start repair function.

I've never had problems to restore an image from the normal system partition to a new harddrive.

If you partition and format first a brand new drive (with 3rd party program) Win7 setup will not make this hidden partition.

But if you want to multi boot several Os'es i think you need this partition.

Greez
Forellenblau