Can I recover to a *partition* with the boot CD?

You should be able to recover just the partition. Are you selecting to restore only the partition (only checking the box for the partition, not the disk)?

What formatting is on the Mac's drive? Is it GPT?

To clarify: I used the ATI Home 2011 rescue CD to make a image of a sysprepped C: drive from a Dell computer. This is the image I'm trying to copy to a Bootcamped partition on a mac mini.

File recovery did not boot (which I expected as the MBR isn't copied).

Mac hard disk is formatted as GPT with the 80G drive split in half (top Mac OS, bottom BOOTCAMP -- currently FAT formatted).

When I boot the mini from the ATI Home 2011 rescue CD, I click "recover", I "browse for backup" (which is on my attached USB drive) -- at this point I *do* see the BOOTCAMP drive (labelled "J:") on "My Computer" -- and select the image.

Under the Recovery menu, I choose "Disk and Partition Recovery" and select the backup there again.

"Recover whole disks and parititions" is selected at the next screen.

I select the "Disk 2" -- entire NTFS unlabelled C: drive and the MBR"

And the destination for Disk 2 at the next screen is "Disk 1" -- my external USB drive -- and "Disk 2 - GPT" -- the entire 80G internal mac mini hard disk. Not the 40G "J:" BOOTCAMP drive.

If I attempt to do a "recover chosen files" -- then I can restore to that J: drive -- but it doesn't boot after the restore is finished.

I looked through a series of notes I had made a few years ago about this where I ended up having to use Ghost 14 and an external USB hard disk with an *installed* version of the Acronis image on it -- which worked, but was a PITA.

Am I missing something really obvious? I need to restore the "whole disk" from the image -- but it's not seeing the Bootcamp partition as a destination "disk" in this case.

(I may have to look at Ghost 15 -- which now seems to return a "cold restore" option to the boot CD...)

When you select Disk 2, do you have checkboxes below that for the Windows partition and the MBR and Track 0? You should be able to just select the partition -- don't check the Disk # checkbox.

Also, I'm not quite sure what build of TI you're using or if your even using the TI 2011 CD. You should have options for both the partition and the MBR when you select to restore the entire disk. What you describe sounds like the option shown for an earlier version.

No, I do have both sub options for Disk2.

However, if I deselect the MBR option (which I'm pretty sure I'd need for the Bootcamp partition to boot, right?)...

the next screen tells me to "specify recover settings of Partition C"

and the only highlighted line is "new location" in the "Partition Location (required)" section.

Where, if I select *that*, the only thing I can select is "Disk 1" -- my external USB hard disk with the image on it.

That said -- my bootable CD is build 5,105 and I see 5519 is now out, so I'll try that and update accordingly after I make a new CD.

If it's not even showing the internal drive, then it may not be supporting it. Could be drivers or something else. Try the newer build. You can download the ISO and create a CD if don't want to update the installed version right now.

I have not run any tests on restoring the MBR to a GPT drive so I don't know what problems that might cause (if it even allows it). In any case, I don't think you need to restore the MBR. Whatever boot manager (or Boot Camp) you're using should take care of the booting.

Same thing with build 5519 (not surprisingly). It's just odd that I could restore *files* to the Bootcamp partition, but I can't restore the *disk* to the partition.

I guess I'll have to give Ghost 15 a shot here.

So, if I *do* select the entire drive (with MBR) as my "Disk 2" destination -- then it installs and boots the image.

Maybe I'll have to do that, then partition the Windows drive in two, boot from an external Mac OS partition, and format the second internal partition as HFS+ and install the Mac OS on it.

Working completely backwards might work -- at least until Ghost 15 arrives...

So, for what it's worth.

Ghost 15 does what I want. It now comes with a Boot CD that can restore *and backup* from the CD.

And it will recover to a Bootcamp partition without jumping through a lot of hoops.

Hopefully, Acronis -- which I prefer because it usually works with a wider variety of hardware (and VMWare Fusion) -- will figure out how to make this happen someday.