Disk image with exclusions was a life saver
I was working on a laptop for a friend where drive C contained numerous unrecoverable errors. I had tried to make a disk image, but because of all of the errors it failed. I was to the point where the only reasonable solution was to install a new drive and restore the operating system. Unfortunately the serial number on the certificate of authenticity was not completely legible. With no restore disk and no complete and valid serial number I was desperate. The disk contained three partitions. The first was a hidden partition labeled as system. The second partition was drive C and the last was listed as HDRECOVERY.
What I did to recover the machine was to perform a full disk backup while excluding all of the files in drive C. True Image 2014 created the partitions leaving drive C blank. By putting the new drive that I created into the computer I was able to boot up into the recovery area on the disk and do a factory restore on the machine. I can not tell you how relieved I was and how completely satisfied I was with True Image.
It is a valuable tool that has saved me numerous times. My hat is off to the developers that wrote the code and produced the application.
GroverH,
I went back and tried to perform the same backup using the disk mode and the exclusions and nothing looked as I remembered it. The exclusion area that I used was a directory tree where you selected with a check those folders that you didn't want to copy however, when I tried it before replying to you I could not get it to display as it had done for me. I knew that I was able to accomplish the task so I went back over the steps I followed to make it work until I found the combination that I had used. Outlined below are the steps that I followed.
First I booted the machine with the defective hard disk up on the 2014 rescue disk. Next I chose the utility option to clone the disk. Then I selected the disk that I wanted to clone. Instead of using the automatic options I selected the manual options. Then I selected the option to specify what I wanted to exclude. Up pops a menu tree with all of the folders in each partition. I selected the partition containing the windows partition and selected all of the folders. When the utility began working it created the three partitions on the new disk perfectly except that the windows partition (drive C) was blank. All of the files and folders that I had selected were excluded. Since that was the partition with the bad spots ATI was able to read the information in the other partitions and simply skipped over all the files in drive C while cloning the disk and creating the three partitions on the destination disk that was plugged into one of the USB ports.
Hopefully, this gives you an idea of what I did and how I was able to exclude the files in drive C. I hope this helps you with your task. If you need more details let me know and I will be happy to be more specific.
Thank you Virgil. I was just looking for info as I have never restored or cloned a disk where exclusions were applied to the target.
GroverH,
This was a first for me as well. The friend that I was helping was in a jam financially and couldn't afford to buy a new license for Windows 7. The label containing the serial number was worn and unreadable so I couldn't do a clean install of Windows 7 even though I tried. I just couldn't guess the last segment of the serial number (I only needed two characters). I tried everything else I could think of without any luck so I really needed the recovery partition so that I could rebuild the drive. I was ecstatic when it worked so well.