Resolved What is the best way to Image a SSD C: drive for easy restore

I am purchasing a new PC with a 256gb Primary SSD drive with win 7 professional as the windows operating system and a 1TB seagate HDD as a second drive, with my old pc i used Ghost 2003 to image the C: drive so that i can restore it in the event of a problem, I have been told that Ghost 2003 is not compatable with Win 7 so i would appreciate any suggestions as to the most simple and foolproof way to backup/image the C: drive so that it can be restored in the event of a problem I am not very techinical user

many thanks for any replies

 

One option: Cavalry "Retriever" Series EN-CAHDD2BU3C-ZB 2.5" & 3.5" Black Standalone SATA Hard Drive Duplicator + USB 3.0 Dual-Bay Dock - $53.99 (USD) including shipping

 

Acronis True Image will create a secure zone on your 2nd hard disk and put the image there. You can also create a boot cd for recovery purposes. Excellent piece of software. No - its not free but worth every penny.

 

Thanks for the recommendation Arie, is Acronis True Image reasonably Idiot proof as I am not all that techinical and would not want to make an unrecoverable mistake !!
What is meant by a Secure Zone is it another name for a hidden partition also does it allow you to put the backup onto an external USB hard drive and recover from it ?

 

Depends on how you define "Idiot" but - yes its pretty straightforward.

Yes - its a hidden partition and can be anywhere you choose. USB drive, network drive - anywhere you like. You can also create a bootable cd for disaster recovery.

 

Does it have to use a hidden partition or can you just image to a normal folder that will allow you acess to delete old images as they are not needed or to back them up to another drive.
The only experience i have with Imaging software is Norton Ghost 2003 and this allowed you to copy the image wherever you choose.

 

The whole point of the secure zone is for a full backup that cannot ordinarily be accessed. However, you can simply save an image file in an ordinary folder and use the program's own browser to extract individual files from the archive if required.

 

Great source for Acronis True Image and Disk Director. No user group membership required. Highly recommended.

 

I have been given Laplink DiskImage as a present I have tried it and it seems to work okay any comments on Pros and cons of this program

many thanks for any replies

 

I used TrueImage in my old XP x86 box and became reliant on it. I would rotate about 10 old discarded but working drives (IDE and SATA) for cloning and am now using five SATAs from that group in a new Win7 x64 machine.

The old TI version (2011, I think) was not compatible, so I downloaded the free version from the WD site (called the "WD Edition ") and am using it. The caveat is that you must have at least one WD drive in the system, and it doesn't need to be the clone destination drive. It seems to do the same thing as before for cloning, but I would warn you that when it reboots after the operation (second reboot) it does not turn off the destination drive, and booting with two identical system drives may not be a good idea. You can check a box to turn off the computer after cloning, and that's what I do.

 

Shouldn't make any difference. You need to set the boot HD in BIOS and that's the drive that will be used irrespective of what is on any of the other drives.

It'll only look for alternatives if the first boot drive fails.

 

It worked that way with my old XP system with a conventional BIOS, but the new build has UEFI with "Windows Boot Manager" listed as the first boot drive. If I select the SSD itself it won't boot. The first time I used True Image (WD Edition) it rebooted after the cloning operation and with two drives containing the EFI partition it selected the drive that was just cloned. I found out when I hot-swapped that drive and everything went black. I've read for years that booting with two identical system drives can sometimes confuse Windows and it shouldn't be done, but with XP I accidentally did it a few times without any noticeable problems.

TI-WD doesn't work like my old TI Home (2010 or 2011) and doesn't stop after the cloning operation, but either reboots as the default or shuts the computer down if a check box is selected before it finishes. If you don't check the box it will reboot, which IMO is bad engineering on the part of Acronis. The old TI-Home would stop and ask if you wanted to shut down the computer with no option to reboot.

UEFI behavior varies between motherboard brands so it may not work like this with all systems. I have a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-D3H mobo with AMI BIOS.