Thinkpads Forum

Recently I tried to use Rapid Restore Ultra to backup my T42 to an external USB harddisk that was partitioned: one 20 GB partition in FAT32 for data from a desktop, two 40 GB partitions in NTFS for backups of a T42 and an R51 respectively, and a final 60 or so GB NTFS partition to hold large data files (photos and work files mainly) so they can be moved between different machines.
To my horror RR, without any warning, simply reformatted the whole drive into a single partition, wiping all data already on it, and began to backup my TP's harddrive onto it. Which lost me some data that were, fortunately, still available on my computer's internal harddrive.
Is there any way to let RR do a full system backup to a dedicated partition on an external USB drive, without risking the data already on a different partition?

I had the same thing happen; I don't know how to prevent it, but I did notice that this also made the external HD boot to Rescue and Recovery (which is convenient).

If you do find a way to do this, please let us know!

I do backups to one sepcific partition of a pratitioned usb-hdd using
R&R 2.04. You just have to select the correct backup target in the backup settings of R&R.

What repartitions the hdd is when you create a bootable Rescue Media for Rescue And Recovery on a external HDD (instead of a CD).
I had the same surprise like you.

But in the end I came to the conclusion to buy another HDD an make it a bootable Rescue Media for R&R and also to store the actual backups on the same drive. So that you can boot and restore from one external hdd when you need to restore.

Well, in Rapid Restore Ultra (version 4.0) the only choice you can make concerning the backup target under 'preferences' is to pick 'External USB harddisk', but not a specific partition. And I'm not talking about making rescue media, but just about a straight backup of the C: harddrive. The surprise was that once the backup started, there was no warning at all about the ISB drive being partitioned: Rapid Restore just wiped the whole thing and turned it into one big partition.
So I guess it's back to finding another backup program. Or use another USB drive.