drive image backup

blink3times wrote on 4/30/2009, 2:34 AM

"I had tried using DriveImage 2003 and it seemed to work, but when I tried to restore several OS images to disk, the machine would not boot from the restored images."

When you install a windows OS in anything other than the ROOT disk, ROOT partition, it will then track down the root disk/partition and install part of itself in the root. So in actual fact you now have an OS spread across 2 partitions. This won't work when disk imaging with ANY imaging program.

You must make sure that the OS you want to image has been installed in the root disk/partition so the OS is being imaged as ONE whole entity in the same partition. Now when you image this... the WHOLE os is imaged so you will be free to move it anywhere you wish independent from any other partition.

gpsmikey wrote on 4/30/2009, 6:45 AM

Sort of -- If you had windows installed in the first partition on the disk then decided to migrate to a new disk and install BING in the first partition for example so that windows is now in the second partition you will have to restore your windows image to the second as expected, BUT you then need to go into the windows partition and edit the boot.ini file (you can do that from BING) and change which partition windows is installed in. If the boot.ini file is not correct, then you get strange messages about ntloader not found or HAL problems etc. This applies to anything that is used to restore windows to a partition - the boot.ini file must match which partition you restored it to (at least this applies up through XP -- Vista isn't allowed in the house along with Norton and AOL).

For more info on the boot.ini file in XP, see this article from M$ and Terabyte:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=159

mikey

blink3times wrote on 4/30/2009, 10:02 AM

"the boot.ini file must match which partition you restored it to (at least this applies up through XP --"

Correct.
Up to (and including xp). Vista on the other hand is self adjusting. I can image vista on partition 1 then move it to partition 2 and simply boot up on it without having to edit anything.

Porpoise1954 wrote on 5/1/2009, 5:05 AM

If I move the VISTA partition I have to edit GRUB... ;-)

gpsmikey wrote on 5/1/2009, 6:37 AM

The instructions said "Windows NT or better", so I installed Ubuntu Linux :-)

mikey

Widetrack wrote on 5/5/2009, 7:00 PM

The bitter ironies of computer use never cease to amaze me. As I’ve been trying to absorb all the info everyone’s offered here, and get to the marketing phase of my current project, my basic production machine has been off, resting happily, I thought, except for the couple of times I tried to image and restore its OS disk.

So yesteday, I turned it on, just for fun, and bingo, I got a “disk read error,” usually a fatal problem in my experience. Since I imaged it a few times with Power Quest Drive Image, I ought to have a quick replacement for the OS drive, but these are the images I couldn’t get to boot.

So now it’s significantly more urgent than before that I find a way to restore one of the 3 most recent images onto a new disk that will actually boot.

I’m going to use the Windows disk management utility to delete all partitions on my potential backup disk, and try to restore the image again.

BTW, does anyone know why a 250GB disk would have a 7.8GB “unallocated” partition? I see this in Partition magic, on all my working OS drives, but the potential backup does not have it.

Thanks to all.

gpsmikey wrote on 5/5/2009, 7:25 PM

Would this machine be one you purchased with the OS pre-installed from someone like Dell ?? If so and that "unallocated partition" is at the front of the disk, I would suspect that is the recovery partition or whatever they call it these days. Normally not available to the user (they use an "unknown partition type" or some such). If this is the case, and if we are talking XP here, I think what you need to do is either put a dummy partition back so the windows partition is the second one OR edit the boot.ini file to change which partition it is being restored to. If this is Vista, I don't have a clue since it is not allowed in my house (along with Symantec and AOL).
XP expects to be restored to the same partition number it came from unless you modify the boot.ini file. If that is not the case, what are the error messages (or symptoms) you get when you try to boot a restored partition ??

mikey

Widetrack wrote on 5/5/2009, 8:58 PM

Mikey:

The "unallocated" partition is the second partition, and I installed XP and did all the updates up to SP 3. When I restore it, I first remove all partitions, then restore.

I'm going to try to make another image and restore again. I've been making the original disk partition small, since it's a 250 GB disk and the data on it only takes up 40 GB. this time I'll bite the bullet and image the whole thing, usu an all-nighter.

blink3times wrote on 5/6/2009, 3:00 AM

You have to make SURE xp was not installed on two partitions before you image. If for what ever reason xp was installed on another partition other than the root partition then some of its boot files will be installed in the root. If this is the case then you will have to image both partitions and install both images each time.

You won't have this problem if xp was originally installed in the root because the ENTIRE os will be in just that root partition.

In other words regardless of where you install xp, its boot files must be in the root directory, so depending on how you have xp installed it may live completely in one partition.... or spread across two.

douglas_clark wrote on 5/6/2009, 2:19 PM

If Win7 includes the full image backup/restore functionality that Vista apparently has, as shown in this Vista Complete PC Backup and Restore video, that would be worth looking into. (I don't run Vista, but I will be trying the Win7 x64 RC when Vegas9 arrives).

I will also be looking into the Acronis Universal Restore functionality mentioned here.

gpsmikey wrote on 5/7/2009, 7:26 AM

You never indicated exactly how it failed to boot when you had tried a restore. I used to use Drive Image all the time and had no real problems with it (until they sold out to Symantec ... ). If there was only one partition on the disk and it was the first one (free space after that partition doesn't count) then a restore should work and get you back up running again. Sometimes you have to tweak the MBR a bit to make sure it shows that as the boot partition, but it should work. You should not have to "image the whole drive", only the real partition.

For future reference, something that is usually a good idea is to do a disk cleanup (get rid of temp files etc) and defrag the disk before imaging. Tends to make things cleaner.

mikey