Imaging questions re. TI and Plus Pack Build 7046

Hi. I'm new do TI and this forum, having just purchased the product 2 days ago, and I have a few questions. I'm running Win XP Pro SP2. The system requirements for TI specify SP3, but the trial verson worked with SP2, and tech support assured me that paid version will also operate with SP2

I attempted to burn an image of my entire disk to DVD's, using the boot media (Acronis loader option, not Bart PE). In 6 attempts, I encountered 5 failures. Sometimes, there would be an error message while writing to the DVD's, and the backup would be halted (happened 3 times). Sometimes the backup would complete, but the validation would fail. Only once did I get a complete backup that passed validation, but after looking at other threads on this forum, and reading the Knowledge Base, I don't put a lot of faith into this backup. It appears that the boot media builder is buggy, from what I've been reading. Since I purchased the program specifically to be able to create and restore images from the boot media, I'll probably return the program on Monday, unless tech support can provide a fix (not a workaround, but a real fix).

However, I was thinking about the DVD burning process. I have a 20X burner, but I usually burn at 8X (using 16X TDK media) to decrease the possibility of burn errors. When burning an image using TI within Windows (i.e., no boot disk), I'm given the option of setting the write speed. However, I find no such option when running TI from the boot media, even though it's supposed to boot into the full version of TI. Am I missing something, or does this option not exist under the boot version of TI? My initial thought (prior to reading the forum and KB) was that the image errors might be caused by attempting to burn at the maximum speed. Slowing the burn speed is usually recommended to minimize burn errors.

One other question. I had been using Disk Wizard (which I'm told is a version of the Acronis software tailored to work specifically with Seagate drives). In addition to being able to include the full version of Disk Wizard on the image CD set, the option is also provided to make the 1st DVD of the image set bootable. In other words, the 1st DVD of the image backup set also becomes the recovery disk. I cannot find this option in TI - again, am I missing something? This would be a great convenience, making the image backup set a standalone recovery set.

I'd appreciate your thoughts on any of this. Thanks