Imaging and Partitioning a SATA drive

My company has started getting new PC's in that are using SATA (the wave of the future).

We keep restore images for every PC at each location in case we have a hardware failure requiring us to re-image the hard drive.

I've been creating bootable recovery CD's and DVD's with Ghost 7.0 for our IDE based PC's with no problem over the past year, but with these new SATA hard drives I'm having some problems. Problems in that it does not recognize the hard drive or won't even load.

I've tried using Acronis Partition Manager 7.0 to repartition but the computer just keeps rebooting. I tried using Acronis True Image 7.0 to image to a network share but it doesn't even load. I need to partition the drive without losing the data on it. I don't know if this is due to a BIOS issue or the SATA drives. These particular symptoms are on a no-frills IBM T43 laptop. My next step is to try both in version 8.0, check the BIOS settings, and cross my fingers.

I'm sure someone out there is doing this, I just need to know what apps/versions you're using and any details that are important to get it working.

 

Hi chris, I am unqualified to answer this, but I hope the SATA people may see something.

I would run the harddrive's utilities. When you are sure the drive is being recognised, exit the program. You should be at a DOS prompt. Put the partition program floppy in the floppy drive and open the main executable. It may be able to see the drives then.

Go to the Acronis website and check the FAQs regarding SATA, you may be right about needing the newer version.

Matt

 

I got it working. Version 9.0 of the Acronis Disk Director Suite was able to load and partition the hard drive.

Then I was able to use Ghost 7.0 booted from DOS to image the NTFS partition to the FAT32 partition.

Thanks

 

Well done Chris. Thanks for letting us know how you did it.

That's getting to be quite a sizable "utility library"
I haven't used Acronis, but have had good results with Ghost.

Matt

 

lol, you aren't kidding. Looks like we have to upgrade every year at this rate.

 

Guys,
I have both Acronis Disk Manager and their True Image.

Their True Image works very well with 32 bit systems but dont try it on 64 bit
until an update (maybe this autumn) is provided. Hopefully its an upgrade and
I wont have to purchase it again...

Their Disk Director will work on 64 bit addressing and is more flexable than XP's
disk manager. Free space from any partition can be moved to another (or new)
partition without losing any data. Havent tried to reduce a partition where
some data may be residing (I think it will stop you from doing that).

Anyway, they are good reliable utilities and quite flexable in their operations.

savagcl

 

I love Acronis products. Ever loaded the Norton Ghost 9.0 boot disk? It takes a good 10 minutes to fully load to the point where you can do anything... which is limited compared to Acronis. I can have an image fully resotred disk-to-disk in less than 5. I'd switch all of our recovery disks to Acronis True Image but there is no way to restore a hard drive using command line options. With some of our users, they're just not computer savvy enough to be able to quickly walk them through a restore.

Disk Director 9.0 will reduce partition size on a 32bit system without any problems.