Re: PC-PRO March 2008 CD/DVD Freebie "Acronis True Image 8.0 Personal Edition"

The message <60bbu7F1qb5e6U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
from Adrian C <email@xxxxxxxxxxxx> contains these words:

Hi,

I've just an interesting time replacing an 80GB drive on my WinXP Pro
Dell Dimension 3100, with a replacement 500GB drive (both SATA, Samsung
SpinPoints).

The full product software (requires an email address) on the PC Pro disc
is a few versions behind the current V.11, but thought I'd have a go
anyway reading some of the recent comments here.

The inital plan was to use the software to make an image of the 80GB
original drive and store the created file on another 120GB drive already
in the machine. Then swap the original drive and build the 500GB from
the file on the 120GB using the Acronis Boot 'live' CD.

I went onwards and imaged the 80GB drive in 20 minutes (fast!), swapped
drives and booted the live CD...

Gotcha #1

My Dell system is USB keyboard/mose only, and the live boot CD does not
find the keyboard or mouse once the GUI is up. That's strange 'cuz when
the CD is booting you can type rubbish from the keyboard, but when the
look-alike windows environment is loaded - no key response, nada, nothing...

Well, BartPE & Acronis came to the rescue here!

<http://eu.acronis.com/homecomputing/support/bartpe/>

Acronis have on their website instructions how to load a special cut of
their version 8.0 product as a plugin for BartPE. BartPE when built
(using an XP installation CD) came up OK, and keyboard/mouse control was
regained.... until...

Gotcha #2

The 120GB drive partition containing the image was nowhere to be found.
The partition was dynamic (LVM) and as such is not supported by Acronis
when running under BartPE.

OK, I decided it was time for some straight disk to disk copying instead
of staging via the 120GB disk. With the BartPE live book disk, copying
(and resizing) the partitions from the 80GB original drive to the 500GB
replacement was painless - should have done just that in the first place!

This software (and BartPE) is damm useful & recommended - but if ye are
installing it, make sure to grab the BartPE plugin from the website
(before it gets dropped) and create a BartPE CD - ye might come across
other machines that won't play their boot CD!

Any comments on backup speed using USB hard drives and Acronis?

No comments on _that_ aspect, just a comment on the fact that it would
only let me create _image_ backups (there simply wasn't a disk to disk
option).

When I tried this route (copying to the third partition of the
replacement drive and then restoring to the identically sized partitions
previously created) the resultant disk wouldn't boot in spite of the
ailing maxtor still allowing a trouble free boot at this stage (The
system was failing to boot winXP until I ran chkdsk /r from the recovery
console, which ran ok, but a subsequently scheduled disk volume check on
next reboot kept hanging - the hdd diagnostic confirming that there
actually was a serious problem).

I wasn't very impressed with Acronis's lack of a disk to disk cloning
option. I ended up using the G4U hdd cloning tool to do a 'dumb' sector
by sector clone of the whole disk overnight (about 8 hours to clone a
160GB disk to a 320GB disk) which _did_ work.

--
Regards, John.

Please remove the "ohggcyht" before replying.
The address has been munged to reject Spam-bots.

.

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