true image always messes up my boot drive when restoring to other disks
I am hoping to get a grip on this as I have been using Acronis products for years and this is the first time I have seen this.
I was trying to take a backup image of my 120GB ssd and recover it to a 180GB SSD that I had in my external esata dock. The plan was to replace the drive that was in this PC when I was done. However, Acronis forced me to reboot my system when it was done, and then when it rebooted, the 120GB SSD wouldn't boot anymore. I had to recover it from the last backup. Prior to rebooting I checked the 180GB SSD (that I was trying to lay the image on) and it didn;t even appear to have a file system on it. Odd. I eventually got the 180GB installed but had issues like this over and over.
Now today, I fire up my older PC running acronis home 2010. I have a good backup from this computer on one of the hard drives inside it. I connect my 120GB SSD externally and try to reover the image from this computer to the SSD but it tells me it's write protected. I copy the TIB files to my main PC (running TI 2012) and mount the SSD in the esata dock. I attempt to recover the image from the other PC to this SSD. True image tells me it needs to reboot my system to do this. I cancel out of this process (shouldn;t need to reboot to lay an image to an external non-boot drive) and it tells me that if I cancel the process will not complete. Ok.
I reboot, and my main hard drive will not boot. Again TI 2012 has modified the MBR of my main drive, even though the drive I was trying to write an image to was a diiferent drive altogether. Heck...the image was on a different hard drive also. The image was from my other computer to!
So....what's going on? Is this by design? I started out years ago using the pro versions of the True Image products and I was able to image multiple drives with multiple backups with no issues.
Is there a particualr reason why everything I do when I try to restore an image results in my boot drives getting tweaked and made non bootable?
Thanks. Hope there is some logic to what I am experiencing.
So is this by design? I understand that perhaps the Home edition expects that you would only be recovering a single computer image. However, the way I have used it for years is to make backup images of various PCs at different states of installation. I often pull a hard drive from a brand new computer and make an image of it and save it on my main PC. Then....in the event that I screw up the software or something goes wrong on that other PC, I can pull it out, pop it in my dock and restore it from the image file and it is back to factory specs. This is what I use it for. I still don;t understand why I cannot just take a .tib file and write it to my external drive in my dock without it messing with the MBR of my internal hard drive. This has to be by design.
Again....I am just trying to understand why TI is doing this now when I have used it for years in this capacity and it never, ever, ever touched my boot drive unless I was restoring to that"physical" device. Which I would rarely do.
Thanks in advance. Perhaps TI is not the tool that I need going forward or maybe a pro version would still do what I need?
Marty,
I am not sure I am following you. You can safely do a full disk backup ("image") from Windows. A backup doesn't require the computer to restart. A clone would require the computer to restart. A backup restore would also require the computer to restart. This is why it is better to do clones and restores from the recovery CD: when they are initiated in Windows, these operations modify the MBR so that the computer reboots in the Linux environment to complete the operation.
You can take a disk from computer A, put that disk in a dock in computer B, create a full disk and partition backup of that disk from computer B and store it on a USB disk, or wherever. You can also boot computer A on the ACronis boot disk, and do the backup from there.
If you need to restore, however, ATI in Windows will detect that the image your are restoring is containing a system and will force a restart.
Pat....it never used to do that. For example. I had a new computer with a factory image installed on it. I took it out of the case and put it into my "main" computer via an esata dock. I then essentially made a backup of this disk. I then wiped out this disk and used it for a few weeks to store large files for a project. Then when I was done, and I had backed up these files, I put the drive back into the dock, and would re-image it from the backup I made. I would not have to reboot or restart in a Linux environmnet. It just imaged and was done. The minute it was complete, Windows would detect it and mount it. Of course....I dismounted it and put it back in the original computer and it was like new. I have done this dozens of times without incident. In fact I do it while I am editing video projects in the background....there was no need for a reboot into a Linux mode.
Now TI is telling me that I need to reboot to accomplish this and I do not see why? If I was imaging my main drive (c:) I could understand. But I am writing the image file to a different drive. Why does it all of a sudden need to reboot to accomplish this task? And when I let it reboot, my computer restarts with an error message that the OS couldn't load. I have had to save myself from this 3-4 times by restoring the MBR from a good image.
I am just trying to understand what seems to be a fundamental change to taking an image of a drive and rewriting that image back to the drive when it is not the system drive. The naming convention has even changed...the used to refer to this as backing up and imaging but it seems all about backup and recovery. I am not recovering most of the time...I am imaging a drive. I do not want my boot drive to be modified in any way to accomplsih this.
Does this make any more sense now?
[...], and would re-image it from the backup I made.
This operation is a restore from the TIB file you created. ATI will dectect that the image you have contains an active bootable system and will automatically trigger the reboot to accomplish this kind of operation. I guess this feature was not in earlier versions then...
Does this make any more sense now?
It does, but there is no workaround. To avoid this problem of the MBR modification, you'd have to do the recovery after booting the computer on the Acronis recovery CD.