Thinkpads Forum

Will Rescue and Recovery work in the following situation:

- USB2 drive connected via PCMCIA card (IBM was the last vendor on earth to upgrade to USB2 for some reason).
- Partitioned USB2 Drive (formatted NTFS).

From another post it seems that an external HD may give problems with R&R version 1. I can confirm that; my R&R, that came with my T42 dating from almost a year ago, just refused to work with an external USB2 harddisk, which I had partitioned with a special partition (NTFS) reserved for the T42 backup. After about 10 seconds R&R stopped and told me it could not continue the backup.
It seems that version 2 (and there is now even a version 3, it seems) is more stable and does work in those conditions, but it is a 430 MB download from IBM, which is all well and good is one has a very high speed broadband connection, but unpractical for anyone on a dial-up. So I have resorted to Windows Backup (ouch!), not a very elegant solution (standard it tries to connect to the web to communicate with its masters at Microsoft, which I let my ZoneAlarm deny it; I suspect it is programmed to tell them about the 'State of the machine' that it makes a backup of; then it tries to backup not only my normal hard drive, but also all connected external drives including the one I am about to store the backup on, which seems rather stupid), but better than nothing. At least I should be able to restore my data and software after a crash if I first manage to restore the factory install from the hidden partition or the recovery CDs, and the use Windows Backup to restore the backup... one hopes...
If ever I am near a wifi broadband access point with my T42, I'll try to het the latest incarnation of R&R. Unless one of the briliant minds on this forum knows of a smarter way to get the original version to recognize an external partition...

I think I'll settle with Acronis

DIGITALgimpus wrote:I think I'll settle with Acronis

I use Rapid Restore Ultra and it works perfectly for me.