Confused about restoring to crashed HDD
I am essentially a newbie in the world of backup and restore and would appreciate input from more experienced Acronis users. I have Acronis TI 11 and so far have successfully created full image backups to an external HDD.
I have researched many restore instructions, tutorials and faqs and it seems they all assume that you are restoring a backup full image to a new HDD or a new sector of an existing HDD. I find that useful but my question deals with restoring a full image to an existing HDD that becomes infected with malware or has crashed for some reason.
Does one have to first delete everything on the existing HDD (format) or will the restore procedure overwrite the drive?
If formatting is necessary is there a good app or program that will accomplish it.
Many thanks for any assistance,
Carmen
Thank you Grover for the response and information. Could you clarify this part of your instruction...
"then restore only to drive C part of your backup" I am unsure what you mean by part of your backup - would I not restore drive C in its entirety?
What I have now is a full image backup of my drive C - there are no partitions.
Carmen
Carmen,
This comment was as if you had multiple partitions. You can use Disk Management Graphical View to see if you have any hidden or diagnostic partitions.
If your Disk Management shows only the C partition, then you can choose either the C partition only or checkmark the Disk option. Either is ok since you are simply overlaying our existing disk with an older copy of the same disk.
For Carmen's Question and my answer... I have been struggling with the same issue for 5 days as made a Full bkup of my system after all xp pro and office 2007 updates (which I will refer to as "Clean"). I tried 3 times with no luck using all the options in recovery and making sure the external drive with clen on it was pointer to c drive. each time when I rebooted it would start, then after the windows screen it came up and said cannot find disk.. My SOLUTION was to use Try and decide in 2010 and it worked but the file was 19GB and in total to took 26 hours to accomplish in two steps, the computer did the crunching the remaining of the time. Jon
Jon,
Did you try creating the backup from the Rescue CD? I believe you will find it faster than Try & Decide.
Either Windows or the Rescue CD can be used when creating backups. There are many of the forum contributors that use the Rescue CD primarily for their backup creation feeling Windows is less involved. After creating the important Rescue CD, some even have uninstalled TI from their Windows applications and use the CD for all their TI functions.
If restoring your system drive, Acronis recommends that it be done when booted from the Rescue CD.
Thanks again for your response. Once more I will openly display my limited knowledge of MS Windows XP. When I go to Disk Management Disk 0 shows two partitions: Acronis SZ as a partition;basic; Fat 32; Healthy (unknown partition) 10.88 GB;99% free:and Drive C partition;basic;NTFS; Healthy (system);141.77 GB etc...
Can't recall what the Acronis SZ is but apparently it was created when I initially installed Acronis 11 and became a partition on the HDD.
Questions: what purpose does Acronis SZ serve and do I need to restore this partition or can I just select the C partition for restoration?
your assistance is very much appreciated,
Carmen
Carmen,
Unless you explicitly select the SZ to be included in the backup, TI will ignore it. Most likely, the C: (Windows) partition is the only one included in your backup image.
To restore it, you would select it as the source and then select the existing Windows partition as the destination. Be aware that different drive letters may be assigned to the partitions when booted to the TI CD.
Thanks for the input, MudCrab. I now know how to proceed with future restores.
Will have to go back to the user manual for TI 11 and see what SZ is and what it does.
Carmen
The SZ is a feature of True Image where you can opt to store your Backup Images. It is a feature that has outlived its usefulness since external hard drives are available for a reasonable price.
You can delete the SZ and regain the space it is taking up by using the Manage Acronis Secure Zone feature in the software or from the bootable CD.
But if you delete the SZ, be sure you do so from within the TrueImage program!