Discussion please - True Image & others

I am not which forum this should be posted in, move it if necessary admin!
First my set-up:
Master - 40GB Maxtor Slave - 80GB Western Digital
On Master 'c' Windows XP Home + a few programmes
'E' Programmes
'H' Scratch for Photoshop
On slave 'D' Programmes
'J' Photographs
'P' Page file for Windows
Various small partitions for docs etc.
I have Acronis True Image and made images of 'C' and 'E' on the slave disc.
I also have Goback available but not in use yet.

My questions are:
1. If my master disc fails completely, and I install a new disc, after fdisk and format from the boot floppy, will True Image re-install a fully working copy of my 'C' partition and 'E'partition? How can it if there is no OS installed on the Master?

2. What use would Goback be after a disc failure?

3. If my OS images were on a DVD, would it then be possible to re-install those images to a new disc and have them operational?

Has anybody any experience of this type of scenario?

I have an idea that all my safeguards would be useless then, what do others think?

 

Hi, Never had much success with Acronis.
Prefer Drive Image by Qualcom.
regards

 

Merlin ...

Not to be picky, but Qualcom is a cellphone company. Drive Image is produced by PowerQuest, now owned by Symantec.

r.leale ...

I have no experience with True Image, but am quite happy with PowerQuest's Drive Image 7.

• 1. See the Acronis website. Seems as though the answer should be "yes ".
  
  2. None, if it's a mechanical failure of the drive.
  
  3. According to the Acronis site, "yes ".

I make backups of my primary drive to two partitions (alternately) on a second drive. After a failure of the primary drive I can restore the whole thing by booting from the Drive Image CD ... no OS is required on the drive.

 

JSS3rd,

Another thought. Presumably, if partition 'C' got really ******* up, and you wanted to restore the clean image, it would be necessary to format 'C' first, otherwise True Image would report that there wasn't enough free space on 'C' for the restoration.
Has anyone out there done this?

 

"*******" It wasn't that rude! ! !

 

If C: were ******* up (... don't worry, I say it at least once a day, myself! ) that badly, you'd probably want to format it anyway. And, yes, I've done it, which is why I like DI7 ... you boot from the CD, itself, rather than from emergency floppies. The backup location is recognized and restoration proceeds.

From what I saw on the Acronis website, True Image works much the same way, except that you just press F11 during the boot process. On the other hand, I don't see how that would work if you've just formatted the drive with C: on it.

 

Acronis is what I use, but DriveImage and Ghost work pretty much the same way and competition between these companies has made all of them upgrade with pretty much the same improvements.

All have USB support and all can be run from within Windows minimizing downtime, for example. This latter feature is great. I do images from Acronis while still surfing and running programs (not to be recommended, but at least it's possible). An image of my system partition (15 gigs full) takes 25 minutes.

The image can be stored almost anywhere. The boot floppies (or the CD) can then return the image to the hard drive so no installed OS is necessary.

Acronis and probably the others even have USB drivers in DOS floppies now so that images can be returned from an external drive connected to a USB port. The usual places to keep images are CD-RW, DVD-RW, second hard drives, or external drives.

USB support from DOS is availabale from www.bootdisk.com for $4.00, but there are many places on the net to download DOS USB drivers.

 

Thanks for all the views given, I started the discussion because I have a morbid fear of an HD failure, and one of my discs is noisy at boot. They both are reported as being OK by SMART and Speedfan, but it worries me a bit.
My master disc, a 40GB Maxtor ,is rack mounted, and I have two other discs set as masters ready to be slipped in which I exchange as needed. I have a 20GB back-up with a fully working and updated XP, and a 10GB with which I try to fathom the mysteries of Linux.
My slave disc is a 80GB, and in partition 'D' I have installed the more space greedy programmes, such as Photoshop. The problem is that for my back-up XP, the programmes in 'D' are not accessible because the registry lacks the necessary entries made during the installation. Otherwise all works OK when I put the back-up HD in.
What I shall try now is to make an Acronis image of my XP which is fully functional, and mount this image on the back-up 20GB disc. This way the two XP's should be identical, and all the data and programmes on the slave should be accessible to both OS's. If it works, I shall be able to bypass a master disc failure in less than a minute. I Hope ! ! !
Incidentally, I don't think that Linux will ever replace Windows.