Imaging on a disk with partitions

John,

This definitely doesn't sound right, you should be able to image to any partition that Windows can see. In fact that message sounds more like a recovery or clone of a drive.

Could you either type out what you are doing to make the image or perhaps post some screen shots of what Windows Disk Management shows of your disk layouts, and some shots of your 2011 and what it is showing.

Sorry JP but I have to ask: why do you want to partition the 1TB USB drive in two? If your intent is to back-up the 2 500Gb disks then you only need to make image backups of these to the 1TB drive, and name them carefully so you can distinguish between them later.

You can make as many backups as you want--no need to further "partition the external 1TB drive into two". Maybe you want to do this to easily keep track of which-is-which, but still, you'll be limiting yourself by making them each 500Gb (because the bu images for your 500Gb drives are going to be different sizes after imaging).

To respond to both Colin B and tomf I will give some more detail. Yes the operation I wish to carry out is the full cloning of the disks. I have two seperate internal disks disK C a 500GB disk with 32bit Vista( there is also a small recovery partition on this), and disk D another 500GB disk again with a small partion ie I have set up the PC to be dual boot with two completely seperate drives.
I wish to seperate these two drives by having the "clones" on my external 1TB USB drive which I have partitioned into basic volumes P and Q both of 500GB capacity. Using the clone function in Home image 2011 the choice is given for which disk needs to be cloned. Selecting say C the next choice is to which disk is the clone to be made. The screen shows the full 1TB capacity of the external drive and not the seperate volumes P and Q. If I select this disk and go to the next step a message comes up saying effectively the target drive has partitions which will be removed. If I allow the process to continue the software will of course clone to the 1 TB drive and after viewing the target drive it will be shown to have no partitions and with a contents the size of disk C ie it has not cloned to half of the external drive capacity. My question is how can I clone the two disks to both be shown seperately on the 1TB drive in the separate volumes P and Q. Any help would be appreciated.

Then you can't use the "Clone Disk" function for that. Instead you would have to make Backup images of the original drives, and then Restore those images to each of the partitions you've created on the 1TB drive.

Thanks tomf. Does that mean that with backup I get a complete image of the drive including all of the programmes, the operating system, files, settings etc as my reason forwanting to do this is that I have many programmes on each disk which I would find troublesome to find again and my reason for wishing to take copies is so that I have readily available a complete image of the disk that I could use if either of the internal disk fails. I thought you could only achieve this by cloning the disk.

JOhn,

To restore all system, programs and files in a full operational manner after a disk crashes, you just need 2 things:
- a disk and partition backup (aka a disk image) of all the partitions of the disk you want to protect,
- an Acronis recovery CD that you have tested by booting on it, and restored a couple of files from your backup.

You don't need to turn on the sector by sector feature of the disk and partition backup.

You don't need to do a clone. A disk and partition backup uses the same technology as a clone. The difference is that the backup is storing the information in a holding file (a TIB archive) instead of laying the information on another disk immediately. The benefit of a backup is that you can store several backups on the same backup disks, whereas a clone has to be redone entirely if you want to update your "backup".

Thanks Pat L I'll look at this.