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Does Acronis TIH 2011 Require a Formatted Hard Drive?

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This question is based in total ignorance, but I am confused by what the use of the term "image" means with regard to a recovery.

My laptop hard drive failed.. I have an image backup on an external Western Digital Passport. Does that 'image' include the file system information and file allocation data from the old hard drive? Do I need to format and allocate the new hard disk drive (or will Acronis do that from the external backup image)? If I must first format and allocate the new hard drive, does it have to be the same file system (FAT or NTFS) as the drive from which the backup image was made?

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Yes, an image contains the file system as it existed on your hard drive.

If you intend to recover the image without formatting the hard drive you will need to run TIH2012 from the recovery CD (you did make one didn't you? :) ). If you haven't made an Acronis recovery CD you will need to download the recovery ISO from your Acronis account and then burn that to a CD.

Just to make sure everyone is using the same terms.

In Acronis speak an image is a complete disk or single partition copy of the data pattern on your hard drive saved in a special container file, the TIB file (think of it as being similar to a zip file). Only Acronis products can read this file.

A clone is a direct hard drive to hard drive copy of the data pattern that is on the source drive - no end file is produced.

A backup is where you have selected individual files and folders on your system to be copied into a tib container file.

A complete disk can have one or more partitions - all disks will have at minimum one partition, this is often what most people see as their 'C:' drive. A drive can have more than one partition and in modern systems and those provided by brand name computer companies (HP, Lenovo, Dell etc) will come with more than one partition, some maybe hidden so you don't neccessarily know they are there, others you will see as you will have partitions C:, F:, G: etc and they will display in your file manager.

The reason I've mentioned this is to make sure the image you have will, when recovered, do what you expect.

A complete disk image will restore to your drive everything your old drive had on it, if your new drive is larger you will get the choice to expand the image to fill out your new drive space, if your new drive is slightly smaller, you will be able to adjust the recovery to this as well, depending on how much free space there was on your old drive.

If you have only imaged a single partition (quite possibly just the C:\) then this will restore the OS and whatever the contents of your C: partition contained, but you might find it won't boot the first time around and as this is a laptop it almost certainly has manufactures tools and posibly other utilities in hidden partitions, which won't have been imaged. This may or may not be a problem.

So, no you don't have to format the new drive, this will happen automatically, if you do format the drive, it will be overwritten anyway by the one contained in the image.

As an aside, the Acronis forum is often slow at refreshing your browser, so if a post doesn't seem to be going through, it is a good idea to check by opening another tab, browsing to the forum and see if your post has made it. If it has, you can just close the other tab down. This will prevent, as you've seen your post appearing multiple times because you've hit the save button again thinking it's all gone wrong, when it actually hasn't.