Backup Question and Support Comment
The question I have is that my Dell machine has a 55 MB partition, for backup I am shown the main partition and can check the 55 mb partition (Acronis 10)
Is there an advantage to keeping the 55 mb partition? Will machine run without it if its restored without it?.
Not a huge issue, an anoyance but have not restored a mcaine with a partition like that. Saving both ways and a bit of an anoynace.
Also: I thought it would be a quick email to support. Its all grayed out excpet the type of question. Everying else is gray and will not take any input.
If you are using vista or w7, most of these installations include a hidden, reserved partition that contains certain system files including the boot manager (equivalent of the ntldr file in xp), so you you have to restore that partition if you want windows to work. This partition would be the one marked as ACTIVE under the Disk Management program in windows (to find this select My Computer, Management, Disk Management). This partition could be as small as 10MB or bigger depending on what the vendor put in there. Some vendors, e.g., Toshiba put various tools and original startup files in this partition too. Some vendors just have their own partition with the original disk image or tools or both but not the windows system files. If you don't know which your partition is, just include it; 55mb is peanuts. It's possible, but not usual, to install vista or w7 so that the boot manager, etc is in the same partition as the rest of the OS, and some machines will be set up that way and may or may not have an additional partition for tools, original disk image, other program they want to sell you, etc.
If it's not the ACTIVE partition, some ati users just delete the partition and rely on ati to be able to restore their machines and not the vendor tools or vendor's copy of the original disk image.