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Booting from Disc Image

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Hi All,

I cannot boot my Windows XP (Home) computer and I'm on the road. I therefore don't have my bootable disc or the OS.

However, last week I made a .tib backup disc image on Acronis and placed that on an external hard drive.

Is there any way I can use that image to create a bootable disc so that I can boot up my computer?

Thanks in advance,

Elliott

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Try downloading a bootable iso from your account at www.acronis.com.

Thanks, Thomas. Yes, I obtained the bootable media from my account and burned it to a disk and used that to get into Acronis on my non-bootable computer. But I'm not sure what to do now.

Elliott

What version of TI do you have? You now want to restore your backup to the non-bootable computer.

  1. Read Grover's Guide http://forum.acronis.com/sites/default/files/forum/2009/08/3426/gh-acro….
  2. Boot the CD
  3. Select Acronis TI to start it.

The guide is for an older version (V9) but the principles are the same.

Thank you! Its V10. Ok, since my backup was a week old I was hoping to just find some way to get to boot the computer without restoring the backup. I have some doubts about my backup image. It is 30 GB, but my computer shows that the disk was 120gb and 80 Gb was unused. So I'm worried about the 10gb difference between my image and the original.

Elliott

TI does compression when you create an image so a 30GB image sounds reasonable. TI only images the sectors that are used. In your case 120-80=40. What errors do you get when you try to boot the computer?

You might try some of these suggestions http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6031733.html to get the machine to boot before restoring.

Great article! I'll look for my XP CD so that I can try these things out. I'll let you know tomorrow whether I have succeeded. Otherwise I will restore.

Elliott

Hi Elliott

One thing I would try before all of the items in that article is to run SpinRite - this can be found on http://grc.com and I have first hand experience of it fixing a disk on two different systems. Do this before you do anything else as you may otherwise destroy what you are trying to save.

Spinrite is a great product, but it costs $90. If your goal is to test the hard drive, look to see who the drive manufacturer is, and then go to their website. All the drive manufacturers offer a free utility to test the integrity of a drive. SpinRite does more, but it may not be worth it if you will never use it again. If the drive passes the manufacturer utility, then start looking at the Windows problems. If it fails, shut it down and don't do anything else to it until you decide what to do about your data and whether your backup is good.

Hi Dogma,

OK so SpinRite it costs... - it rather depends on how valuable the data is. I was just giving the OP another option. It will also do a far better job than a manufacturers software as it actually tries to recover the data not just find bad sectors.

RayG wrote:

Hi Dogma,

OK so SpinRite it costs... - it rather depends on how valuable the data is. I was just giving the OP another option. It will also do a far better job than a manufacturers software as it actually tries to recover the data not just find bad sectors.

I agree with everything you said. I was just aiming to provide a way to find out if the HD was bad before paying for Spinrite, since Spinrite might not be needed at all. If it is though, I agree that there is no better tool for the job. :) Also, before attempting ANY kind of repair, it would be wise to test the existing backup. If it isn't usable, I would try to get as much data off the drive as possible first, then do a repair second.