Partition Alignment on True Image Home

I think you should post this on Wish List, which is there for feature requests.

So - We cannot clone around with 2011.

1) But - will 2011 work on backups of AFD drives to non AFD Drives
2) Will recovery work from non AFD backups to AFD Drives.
3) Will AFD to AFD backup and recovery work.

Will all other features of 2011 work with and across AFD/NonAFD drives.

Can we please have a definitive statement from Acronis on whether alignment when cloning works when moving to SSD or Advanced Format drives?

With AFD, for example, now being used even when not strictly necessary (e.g. 2TB drives) it is important to get this clear.

Acronis response to this is:

*crickets...*

???

I have a question, I have an aligned 750GB EIDE drive that will be updated to a 2TB SATA drive. I need to clone all my data to the larger disk but would like for the new drive to be aligned without having to use PAT or a similar utility. I have prepared Windows for the switch to AHCI in advance. Can I just clone the drive to a partition on the new drive or clone to the full drive to preserve the 4K sector alignment? I am using Acronis 2010, and have been using this product line for some time now with good success however when following steps on the forums for an SSD recently the drive still ended up misaligned. Seems like a patch should be released to correct this for these products. I have been a long time supporter of Acronis and have also used the server product line but I'm not ultra impressed that these issues have been going on for awhile now. Appreciate any assistance with the best procedure to be used. Thanks

James,

Print a screen capture of your disk management console to have eyes on your partition layout, do an all-partition backup of your disk, then restore one partition at a time from the recovery CD. THis will allow you to specify the space before the first partition and choose 1MB. THis will also prevent ATI to scale the partitions automatically. You will be able to specify which partition to extend.
At the end, after the last partition is restored, restore the MBR and track 0, and the disk signature.

Thanks, the disk just has one large partition. However it is my documents and data drive, my OS is on an SSD. It has permissions setup so that some users have limited access to various folders on the disks which includes historical family documents, family videos, etc. I want windows to treat the new larger drive as the same drive so that I dont have to redo all the permissions on this unit. If not it will take several hours just to reconfigure and test all the pemissions. This unit is our HTPC which logs in automatically to a nanny safe profile that we dont want to share out our family records with. It also shares out TV and documents to family members that are home group users, but restricts based on least privilage to the main autologon account. I think you have a good idea about setting a 1mb chunk at the front to keep it aligned and will see if I can do that. I did notice that Samsung has a free Acronis based utility for aligning the drive as well. Im concerned about the image process not carrying over my privilages though but in a worse case I can get it back, just need to document all my folder's and shares permission config before the images process.

I found a solution to move permissions to a new system drive with a cloned disk, if you export the following registry key with subkeys it carries the permission information for all your drives. In my case since the OS drive is remaining the same it shouldnt be an issue as long as the drive letter and folders match up. This is a great way for server admins to migrate permissions without having to redo your AD permissions or if you want to install a new mainboard with a fresh OS load and maintain your old system permission or if you have a complex setup like mine. This box also hosts 2 web servers, home DVR security, and shares out our TV and data files with homegroup privilages to the whole house, its taken me awhile to get everything tweaked perfectly. We can even schedule programming from our mobile phones.

Here is registry key that handles the permissions for the drives if anyone is intrested:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\Shares

James,

Thank you for sharing. I would proceed with caution with tools realigning the partitions: make sure you have a backup at hand. Restoring an image will restore the files and their NTFS metadata as they were at backup time. You have a good point about network security settings which is a system setting.

I keep full backups of all my systems and drives. I prefer to have Acronis get the alignment correct upfont without using any utilities. The new drives dont run at optimal speeds without the 4k sector alignment. Im using a couple of the Samsung 2TB drives which require a firmware update but run super cool and are fast for a lower RPM drive. I believe they have the most reliable 2TB on the market right now. Since Samsungs HD divison was bought out we will see if they continue to maintain good reliability and performance. I will have the original drive as a backup as well but would like this to be a 1 time clone process without the headache of re-aligning after the fact. It will likely take 2-4hrs just to clone this disk to the new unit. I did a trial clone without actual proceeding and set it to custom, I didnt see an option to set the desired start point at 1MB as you suggested. Is that option only available if I do a disk restore rather than clone?

Don't use a cloning approach. Use a disk and partition backup. As you restore one partition at a time from the recovery CD, you will have the opportunity to resize and offset the way you like.

James,
When cloning, if you choose the manual mode, you will have the option to add the 1 mb free space before.

Click on the yellow link in my signature below and item 3-CC illustrates cloning and item 3-BB illustrates restoring to a new larger drive. The illustration may not match your partition setup but it can provide the basics. Look at your own Windows Disk Management graphical guide to see how your partitions are sequenced.

Thank you for linking these excellent guides. I will use as a reference when I do my restore operation.

I got around to doing this project last night and added the 1MB infront of the initial parition. Whats strange though is the Samsung/Acronis Alignment Utility reports the 1st partition on this drive as out of alignment and the second in alignment. I didnt think that was possible. Bellow is the system info captured by windows which for the second is divisable by 4096 and gives me a whole number which implies the unit is aligned. This system config wasnt as easy as I hoped and took some tweaking to get my OS to boot after the change over, some of my boostrap info had been placed on a secondary drive that had been replaced in addition to the fact that my motherboard only supports the first 4 SATA ports plus the 2 that can be used only in AHCI mode which is what I wanted to run my SSD at top speed. I had moved it to the SSD so it could boot standalone but the system defaulted to the other drive at first boot. For some reason my second 2TB disk didnt want to show up until I swapped a 2 of the SATA cables. I am suer all my critical disks and optical drive were in 1-4. Its all working now, and I believe it must be aligned with the 1MB starting position, its just weird that the utility reports it as otherwise. Do you think the Samsung Alignment utility is just wanting to resize it to a more common configuration with the 4K offset closer to the start of the disk / without a full 1MB of used space at the begining? Im not concerned about loosing a tiny fraction of the total drive given its enormous size and purpose. Again I appreciate everyones help and the awesome documentation you've put on this site. I will pass that info on so others can benefit as well. When rechecking the first starting offset isnt divisable by 4096, its the second. I've included both of the large disk for your reference.

Info from Windows:
Model SAMSUNG HD204UI ATA Device
Bytes/Sector 512
Media Loaded Yes
Media Type Fixed hard disk
Partitions 2
SCSI Bus 1
SCSI Logical Unit 0
SCSI Port 3
SCSI Target ID 0
Sectors/Track 63
Size 1.82 TB (2,000,396,321,280 bytes)
Total Cylinders 243,201
Total Sectors 3,907,024,065
Total Tracks 62,016,255
Tracks/Cylinder 255
Partition Disk #1, Partition #0
Partition Size 900.16 GB (966,536,169,984 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 32,256 bytes
Partition Disk #1, Partition #1
Partition Size 962.86 GB (1,033,860,284,416 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 966,536,462,336 bytes

Model SAMSUNG HD204UI ATA Device
Bytes/Sector 512
Media Loaded Yes
Media Type Fixed hard disk
Partitions 1
SCSI Bus 4
SCSI Logical Unit 0
SCSI Port 6
SCSI Target ID 0
Sectors/Track 63
Size 1.82 TB (2,000,396,321,280 bytes)
Total Cylinders 243,201
Total Sectors 3,907,024,065
Total Tracks 62,016,255
Tracks/Cylinder 255
Partition Disk #2, Partition #0
Partition Size 1.82 TB (2,000,396,746,752 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 1,048,576 bytes

I ended up using the Samsung/Acronis alignment tool and all is running perfect now, hopefully being in AHCI mode will improve performance in addition to having my large disks and SSD aligned. For anyone running a Samsung drive its a free download for their Adv format drives. Would be great if Acronis could bundle an alignment tool with the True Image Product line until support is fully integrated. Seems like this would be fairly simply as Acronis seems to be providing it for WesternDigital, Hitachi and Samsung at this time. Would also be nice to be able to work on any drive on the system from one central location. As I installed the GUI version of the Alignment tool are their any known bugs with Acronis 2010 with it installed? I noticed it had me shutdown some of the ACTI 2010 services during the installs which may mean Im now in a hybrid install configuration.

One additional note, when backing up 500GB of data, if done using the Windows interface it takes about 2hrs, doing it via the boot CD it runs about 4 hrs. Is there a way to manually control the drivers being loaded on the bootCD to make sure its using optimized drivers for network and disk access. I like to do offline backups periodically just to make sure everything is cleanly backed up, may just be an old habit as I have never had an issue restoring and OS drive from an online backup using Acronis but Im a bit paranoid that way!

Adtl note: I havent noticed any orphaned home group shares when doing a clone vs restore operation. I have a case on my backup server where that occured and a work around was to reshare the same folder with homegroupuser$ without actually clicking on share with homegroup. Orphaned shares can appear if one restores a backup to a new drive letter or if someone uses the change drive letter option under disk mgmt while shares are actively used. So far no one at MS has provided an actual way to get at the Homegroup shares dataset so most users are having to do work arounds to fix when it occurs, some of this info is documented on MS Answers forum. Using homegroupuser$ is also a great way to grant access to all computers that are members of that homegroup without the headaches of the built in add to homegroup feature and orphans issue. One can also use this principal for least privilage and restrict specific users or home group members to folders on a shared resource.

Cyborg1024:

There isn't any way for a user to control the drivers used in the Linux recovery environment used by Acronis. You would have to contact Acronis Support with specific machine information and request that they make you a custom ISO of the recovery environment with the latest drivers for your hardware.

The simplest solution is to create a recovery disk based on WinPE, which has the advantage of using Windows drivers. If you base your recovery CD on WinPE 3.0 it will contain all of the latest drivers from Microsoft's Windows 7 library. Additionally, a user can load drivers by using the F6 function while booting the CD.

To create a WinPE recovery disk you would need the Acronis PlusPack and the instructions in this article: http://kb.acronis.com/content/13641

Very good info, I'm curious if anyone has tried this with My7PE, I have built a Windows 7 gui boot disk and adding Acronis to that might also work, I've been experimenting with mounting and accessing encrypted disks for work use. In any case looks like a PE 3.0 disk can be used. I'm at the point where I want to load multiple boot images from a super USB thumb drive, unfortunately the windows installers don't play well with the linux distributions at this point which mean's either a quick mod to the root or separate thumb drives. I have a lot of boot utilities I use for PC maintenance.

When you have an encrypted dying hard drive you need to retrieve the customers data very quickly. For GE encrypted partitions the best way I've found is to load the ISO Admin utility using the Vista boot option on a thumb drive and retrieve the data via command line interface back to the thumb drive.

Thanks again I will experiment a bit and see what I come up with.

Cyborg:

I haven't tried My7PE but have been using MustangPE, which comes with plugins that can add TI 2011 and Disk Director 11 to a WinPE build.

If you want a multiboot Flash drive, the easiest way to accomplish this is to do all of your bootable builds as ISO image files. If you use Grub4DOS as a boot manager on the flash drive it is capable of directly booting ISO image files, so you can have as many ISOs on the flash drive as you want, and it's simple to maintain as your needs change or as programs are updated. Just copy the updated ISO to the flash drive and you're done.

Here's some info on creating a bootable flash drive with Grub4DOS http://themudcrab.com/acronis_grub4dos.php

Excellent, if that works Im going to need a huge flash drive!

As for the size of the flash drive to hold Grub4Dos, a 4gb will work well or a 8GB will last a long time. The size of the iso file which loads TrueImage will probably be under 234,944 KB which was the size of my most recent TI boot media file which has TrueImage and Plus and Addins as options and Disk Director as part of the boot.

Remember, the Flash Drive is just to hold the Acronis programs in place of the CD. We were NOT suggesting that you store the actual backup file on the Flash Drive. Use of an external or eSata will enable you to store several backups on the storage disk.

It prevent a mixup of disks when both are identical, there are several things you can do.

1. Use Windows 7 (or Vista) or the install CD's and create a single small partition on both disks with each partition being a different size. Assign names to partitions so when you see the two disks inside the TrueImage as the targets, they will differ enough so you can select the correct disk. TrueImage does display the target disk and its partitions so you can see the partition you created for purposes of identity. Using Win 7 or Vista to create identity partitions also assures you that the correct starting sector will be automatically done so your disk will be aligned correctly without any special effort on your part.

The motherboard has labels on the SATA connectors such as SATA0 and SATA1 so you can see which connectors are in use and know which disk is the first and second,etc. During bootup, the drives will be identified as to which disk number (use pause key if needed) so this can also help. Disk numbers will differ between Windows and the CD. Windows starts with zero whereas the Linux CD begins with 1.

Grover:

I took Cyborg1024's comment about needing a huge flash drive to mean that he has a lot of boot utilities that he uses for fixing computers and he'd like to combine all of the tools onto one flash drive.

I mssed that. You are probably right.

Yes, I was referring to putting multiple boot Iso's on one pen-drive although I can restore encrypted data back to a GE/Boot USB drive. That particular utility doesn't play well with Ultimate Boot CD or my Linux distributions as it uses a Vista bootloader. I currently have a thumb drive that's maxed out a 16GB. Mainly I use these for system repairs at work. I still find I have to keep CD's and DVD's for these utilities though as not all the PC's support booting off USB. I have yet to find the perfect method where everything could boot successfully from one USB drive. I've tried Yumi, Universal boot installer and a number of other utilities for setting up multi-booting from USB. In some cases I've found one Iso image on the drive can make the difference from it working great to not booting at all. I suspect that will be the case here too but its certainly worth a shot.

I noticed you have to have the Plus pack for Acronis to support generating the PE 3.0 disk. I did start the process by downloading the MS AIK but it looks like the procedure wants the addition to Acronis to finish the process. Im using TI 2010 currently and plan to upgrade again with next release once SSD support is added. I am interested in the Plus packs ability to restore to dissimilar hardware. I have invested a huge amount of time customizing my main PC at the house and it acts as a file server / web server, TV DVR with caller ID, and Security DVR, that's in addition to virtual sessions for work, etc.. At some point I will likely upgrade to a 6+ core AMD processor and the new plus pack restore option sounds intriguing. I'm happy with the current performance on my budget 9150e processor its only a 4X 1.8 Ghz core which keeps the system cool and low power for always on access. Beats having to pay 50$ a month for Sat or cable and my kids enjoy access to our family movies, music, TV, from any computer with Win7 in the house.

You can restore to SSD with 2010 last build. You just have to pay extra attention to disk alignment on restore or partition creation as ATI might not add the 1MB offset *by default* depending on the case. You can always add it manually.

UR is not for the faint of heart: you have to have the right disk controllers and chipset drivers in .INF or .OEM format (uncompressed). Sometimes, you have to fix the installation with the OS installation DVD. Also, some users reported showstopper issues in a multiboot environment.

If you can reinstall the OS'es and applications, I would do it instead of trying the complicated UR feature. If reinstalling is not an option, than UR might be your best friend.

When I moved to the SSD, I upgraded to Windows7 and had to update several applications. So I was ready to reinstall. At any rate, I tried to move my vista installation from another computer for the fun of it and I couldn't get UR to work (not for the lack of trying).

Cyborg1024,

I use OSL2000 to manage my Thumb Drive and it works well. I managed to place Embeded Windows 7 PC on my first Primary Partition 1 (Legally bootable from Thunb Drive). The same partition is also available when used as a data drive when used used with any windows system.

Then I have Partiton Magic Didsk Director11 and True Image2011 on Primary partition 2, Windows 7 Installer on Primary Partition 3.

Primary Partition 4 is used to boot to DOS from where I can run HIREN CD with the WindowsXP as part of the package or many other programs from DOS (with NTFS support).

I could subdivide the last Primary Partiton in to Logical partitions, if needed, for as many as 255 partitions.