Backup & restore of system partition

[stockhausen]

I have just tried using a demo version of Acronis True Image 11 to make an image of a freshly installed copy of XP on a laptop with a view to being able to restore quickly to a known "clean" state.

The problem I have encountered is that Acronis seems to insist on writing to a separate physical HDD (my laptop has a single 80Gb HDD). I tried using an external 320Gb USB HDD - Acronis wants to delete everything off that disk in order to be able to use it

In a prefect world, what I would like to be able to do is to make a copy of the 10Gb OS partition on a DVD and then quickly to restore it, overwriting the laptop OS partition.

It used to be possible with the command based Nero but I believe that the version I have doesn't work with NTFS or DVDs and that the current versions have so many invaluable added features that they are pretty much useless

Does anyone know of some software that will simply and reliable allow me to do this?

 

[bledd]

acronis can backup just one partition, i use it to make an image to the 2nd partition, then at a later date, can restore than back

don't click the 'clone' drive option, just click 'backup' and select just the partition in question, and not the 'mbr'

 

[stockhausen]

acronis can backup just one partition, i use it to make an image to the 2nd partition, then at a later date, can restore than back

don't click the 'clone' drive option, just click 'backup' and select just the partition in question, and not the 'mbr'

Thanks, just giving that a go, creating a .TIB file.

As a matter of interest, how do I run a restore? I will be overwriting the active partition

 

[bledd]

deffo the best way to do it

you can tell it to burn the tib to dvdr-s if you want, personally i'd hold it on your usb hard drive & the 2nd partition

it's a good idea to do things like this before making an image..

disable system restore
run 'ccleaner slim' on your machine

clears out junk then, so the images are smaller


i prefer making backups using the live-cd feature, just feels 'safer' than doing it in windows, and you need the cd to restore anyway

 

[thegoonden]

As bledd said, you're better doing it from a boot CD in case windows burps while you're backing up, but I don't bother me backside and it's given me no trouble (yet, although I've taken the p*** with what I've asked it to do a few times with no worries).

With restoring, again the boot cd is better, but it WILL do it from within windows (ish). It'll do something simillar to Ghost, write a temporary bootblock on the drive, boot into it and then apply the image.
I use acronis a lot to hot swap my Vista32 and Vista64 from within XP, and it works a treat. Not done me a wrong turn yet. The worst it's ever done is report an error about it having written the wrong number of bytes. I re-ran the operation and it finished fine.

 

[stockhausen]

Uhhhmmm, well that seems to work like an absolute dream. I'll give it a bit more testing before I bet my acceptance tests on it and then get back to work - thanks guys, that's saved me a bundle of time!

 

[bledd]

it's worth testing the restore, just incase

don't tick the 'restore mbr' or it'll want to format the whole drive it's restoring to