Formatting Before Restoration
I am using Acronis True Image 8.0 Personal and have a question about the restore procedure.
I have successfully restored my 20GB C: partition many times. Acronis shuts down Windows XP and reboots, allowing me to restore the image from an external drive.
I know that during this procedure Acronis "wipes" all the data on C: and restores the image file to this partition. However, does Acronis also actually format this partition before restoring the image file?
My concern is that if there is particularly resilient malware or viruses hiding on C: then they might survive this wiping procedure. Sometimes it seems that properly formatting the drive is the only way to completely kill such viruses.
Can anybody advise on whether Acronis performs such formatting when restoring image files, or if not, whether the wiping procedure would be enough eliminate resident viruses? Thanks.
Ism using the latest version of acronis true image and I am also interested in this topic. What do you mean by "something like format"?
Actually, the phrase was "something lick QUICK format" [emphasis added].
It doesn't do a low level format. It removes the bootstrap and partitioning info (for a full disk restore) and writes the bootstrap and partitioning info from the image. If only doing a partition restore, then it only writes data to the partition and updates the partition table and metafile data accordingly.
The only thing that survives a full disk restore is the low-level formatting info--think of it as the actual marking of sectors. A virus would have to get low level formatting control of your pc to revise that data and do any mucking about. If it could do that, then even low level reformatting wouldn't help. You would need code to stalk the malicious code and prevent it from doing damage.