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Doubt regarding backup images and destination drive partitions

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Hello, I have been going back and forth regarding the software capabilites for my current situation but I don't seem to find a full answer in the older topics:

I have a notebook, which I monitor from time to time and the amount of bad sectors from the drive is starting to slowly increase, noticed this I already ordered a replacement drive, though the actual disk still has time to go.

I don't count by the time with an external drive or an external enclosure to directly use the notebook, but I have a desktop PC available where I can connect the new drive and access it via LAN, here comes my doubt:

Is it possible to create two partitions in the new drive?, so lets say partition B will hold the image backup (roughly 420 Gb) and the partition A is where the image will be recovered from the partition B located in the same drive. Most tutorials imply the use of another drive for the backup, but as I mentioned I don't count with one and I would rather not mess with the drive of the desktop PC.

I have read on another forums that you should be able to recover the image to a specified partition if it has enough space available; or will the software still bring issues over trying to recover an image that is in a different partition but in the same disk?

Thanks in advance.

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Juan, welcome to these public User Forums.

There are several potential issues involved with this topic:

1. I have a notebook, which I monitor from time to time and the amount of bad sectors from the drive is starting to slowly increase.

2. Making backup images of the failing notebook drive and restoring to a new drive connected via a different / desktop system.

For the first issue, I would recommend making a full disk backup of the notebook drive before the increasing bad sectors become a critical issue.  The backup should be stored on an external USB drive or else a drive accessible from the notebook via the network etc.

Making backup images to another drive is fine but doing a restore / recovery to a drive connected to a different system such as your desktop PC is likely to cause boot problems when that drive is installed in the notebook!

Any recovery should ideally be performed when the target drive is installed in the hosting PC where that drive will be used to boot into Windows - this will help avoid any new device drivers being installed because of differences in hardware components being discovered by Acronis.

Once you have the new drive installed in the notebook, then assuming that the drive is large enough then you can divide it into 2 partitions, the first partition holding the Windows OS and installed applications which is shrunk in size to make free space available for the second partition which can then be used to store a local backup image(s).
Note: even with using a second partition for backup storage, you should also make backups in other destinations too, i.e. to an external USB drive and perhaps to a network drive, so that you have protection in case of a further drive failure or malware attack etc.

Hi Steve, thank you for your response:

The notebook is for the moment out of use to prevent further issues until the new drive arrives.

The problem may draw to confusion the way I explained it, I appreciate your advice about restoring the system once the new drive is already in place to prevent issues related to the hardware, that is not an issue with the bootable software, but my problem is that I currently don't have an external drive with me.

I would normally backup the image to the external drive, then install the new drive and proceed to restore the image from the external drive, so in this case what I want to do is:

1) First initiate the new drive and create two partitions, one for the full backup image of the current drive that is failing and the other one for the system to restore.

2) Install the new drive in the notebook, then use the bootable software to restore the system from the image that is contained in one partition, to the other partition in the same drive (that will be free and plenty large enough).

3) Once the system is restored, delete the backup image and reallocate the partition used to store the backup image, I will later backup to an external media.

I have found topics that point this approach is possible when you don't count with another backup media, since the software can restore images to individual partitions leaving the other ones untouched. That is my main doubt, will it work?, or the software just won't allow to restore the system image contained in partition B to partition A.

Juan, if you are able to create the 2 partitions on the new drive and then make a backup from the notebook to that new drive second partition, then you should be able to do a restore from it to the first partition when booted from the rescue media.

What are the sizes of the two drives involved here?

If the drives are the same size, then I would suggest shrinking the existing notebook drive to ensure that it will fit in the size of partition you will have available on the new drive, then make a backup of the smaller partitions on the drive (ignoring the empty unallocated drive space created by shrinking the partition).

I have done this a number of times for laptops where I have used a 'backup' partition on the same single internal drive to have an available local backup when I have been travelling away from home and have needed to resolve an issue by restoring the backup.

Thank you very much, the current drive is a 500Gb disk, but not used to its full extent(440Gb at most), the replacement drive will be a 1Tb disk, so there will be enough space to spare.

Exactly, I want to achieve something similar to the factory image partition that some manufacturers include with   notebooks and I used at some point but they rely on propietary tools or Windows. 

I think the doubt is solved, thank you again.