Run Acronis for recovery without using the disk?
It looks like I really am going to have to use my Acronis backup for a recovery.
Is it my understanding that if your computer is bootable you can just open Acronis, select "Recovery" and go on with it -- not having to use that bootable disk I made?
If that is so, how do all the programs running in the background affect this?
I have absolutely no idea what you just said here. I've seen it a number of times but I don't know what TI even is.
Too late now anyway. I literally begged for some help with getting my mouse to work so I cold select the Recovery option after I had booted into my Acronis boot CD and no one would give me much direction so I went ahead and used my Dell Factory Image Restore option. Besides the fact that I lost 4 years of pictures and other records that I thought I had safely tucked away within my Acronis backup (on external hard drive), I might be done getting everything installed again in a couple weeks, unless things go wrong. Of course, if that happened I've still got my Acronis backup ... for all the good that does me.
Thanks for your answers and time.
I'm sorry my answer wasn't clear enough. TI = True Image.
It's best to have a TI CD available in case it's needed. Don't just rely on the TI reboot method or the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (ASRM) to recovery. If the drive can't boot properly or won't boot in to Windows, these methods won't be available to use.
When a restore process is started, TI must have full access to the partition being restored. When you try to restore the Windows partition while Windows is running, TI can't obtain full access. As a result, TI must reboot to perform the restore. Background programs aren't a problem because they aren't running in this mode.
As for the mouse problem, you may have the same problem with the ASRM as with the CD version. It depends on the Linux kernel being used and the drivers. You should also be able to restore the backup using the trial version of TI 2011 if you can't get TI 10 to work.