Paragon Drive Image 7

hawk22 · 19th May 2006

Hi anyone here familiar with Paragon Drive Image 7
hawk22

**Steve R Jones** · 19th May 2006

Are you taking a survey or do you have a question/issue that you should go ahead and post

McTavish · 19th May 2006

Not seen a Paragon Drive Image Hawk. Is it new or do you mean Drive Backup or True Image?

**PeteC** · 19th May 2006

McTavish

Yes - it's - Drive Backup 7.0

McTavish · 20th May 2006

In that case then yes Hawk I’m familiar with Drive Backup. Used it extensively for about 5 years now and swear by it. I’ve not needed all of its many features so there are some things I’m not up on.

hawk22 · 21st May 2006

Great, Sorry I named it wrong but that is it. I knew someone here was very keen on it from some post quite some time ago.
Well I have bought Paragon Drive Backup 7 including Paragon Exact Image. But I have never used it. I would love to get the ins and outs from someone that has knowledge on how to use it, I know I could experiment and learn the hard way, but I would rather have some knowledge before things go wrong.
I have taken Images from several Partitions on my hard drives and a complete drive that has no partitions, but I would like to know the right procedure for a Restore.
I have just installed XP on a old 4gig drive just to experiment with.
Which is better Exact Image or Drive Backup. I would use a DVD to burn the Image to using Nero 6. I had made a enquiry with Paragon whether I can use DVD dual layer but the answer was no (not yet) they are are working on it though it will be good when you can. Now I would really appreciate if you could give me detailed info on how to do it correctly I will then do a test run with that old 4 gig drive.
Thanks
Hawk22

McTavish · 22nd May 2006

I’d say if you have some experience with partitions or want to learn, then stick with Drive Backup. Exact Image is similar to Acornis’s True Image and is designed for the novice, it’s feature limited and gives you little control.

Where to start without writing a tutorial – which I don’t have the time for just now Hawk. Make the bootable CD, which boots you directly to the program even if there is no useable OS on the computer. It is easier and safer to use the popup menus you get when right clicking the partition on the graphic bar, rather than using the options from the tool bar. Less chance of working on the wrong partition.

If you keep Windows below about 8.5 or 9 gigs then with full compression it should still fit on one DVD (the pagefile is never included in the image) You can make an image hot from inside the OS you are imaging, or from another OS on the computer, or from the bootable CD. You can save them to another partition or burn them directly to CD as they are being made – set the compression level you want and if saving to another partition for manual burning to DVD/s, then if needed set the option to split the image into sizes that will fit a disk.

I’ve never personally created images hot or burned the image as a complete bootable restore CD. I prefer to write images to a data partition and burn them to CD myself.

I’m not going to be around much till next weekend, but if you have any specific questions I’ll try to answer them.

hawk22 · 22nd May 2006

Thank you McTavish. I have just one quick question regarding the recovery CD that I have just made, when I made the Images of the several partitions as mentioned I did make some with Drive Backup and others with Exact Image will the recovery CD have to be made with the one that was used to make the Image or will eighter one do the trick. There is a recovery Media Builder with both programs.
Hopefully some day when you have some spare time you might be able to fill me in on some more.
thanks
hawk22

McTavish · 22nd May 2006

Don’t know the answer to that one Hawk – never tried it. I did trial Exact Image last year but never really saw the point of it when DriveBackup does it all and so much more.

One other tip is to try and keep Windows as small as possible, not only so an image will fit on one disk, but also to speed up imaging. I keep all personal data on a data partition and have gone to lengths to keep XP at about 2.5gigs. As a result I don’t need compression and I can write an image in about 2 mins. My Win98 takes less than 1 min.

hawk22 · 26th May 2006

Hi, I am not getting anywhere fast here, matter of fact I am not getting anywhere. I have used the Media builder for the recovery CD and it is burning a file onto the CD but no bootable CD it is a DOS.IMG file whatever that means.
So I did a test run on the old 4.3 gig drive made a Image burned to DVD than quickly installed a few useless programs and then attempted to make a restore from the DVD that I had made. The message that I was getting was:
"You are destroying a bootable partition Do you really want to perform the operation." The Image was my C:\ drive.
Something somewhere is terrible wrong.
I used Windows Restore and put it back to what it was before I installed the bunch of useless programs, just to see if my Windows was ok and it was as it restored Windows perfectly to its previous state.
Looks like I need a lot of help here I spent a long time reading the help files but it did not help.
hawk22

McTavish · 27th May 2006

Never wanted or tried the Recovery Media Builder so not sure exactly how it goes. It’s for making customised boot disks for one particular system, with an image and other tools if wanted. I prefer to keep my images separate as I’m constantly updating them, then just use the Drive Backup program itself to restore them. What you want Hawk is the main Recovery CD which is the full version of Drive Backup that you can boot to from CD. It comes as a separate .exe file that will build the CD for you. If you bought Drive Backup online there should have been a link in the download email for it.

If you acquired Drive Backup some other way then look to see if the “Recovery CD Image” .exe was included. If not you can get it by logging on to your account at the Paragon website. http://ess.paragon.ag You also get updates and your free upgrades from this page as well as sometimes other free stuff and special offers.

The message saying you are about to destroy a bootable partition sounds perfectly normal when you are about to restore an image to that partition. You are indeed about to completely wipe that partition by writing an image over it. I’ve had no desire to make the bootable image CDs of the type that gave you this message and in reality I’ve not had to restore images very often in the last couple of years (I do it more with cloning these days), so I can’t remember if I’ve seen that exact message, but it sure sounds typical of the type of second chance warning messages that Drive Backup will give you.