Thinkpads Forum

I have several older TPs, and have addressed my backup concerns re: these in another thread. But this question is about the (presumably) easier backup process on a T61.

I am replacing a failing drive in my T61 with an identical one. If I use Acronis, is there any way to backup first (Backup All Partitions including Recovery Partition, NOT do an Image) to and intermediate USB external drive, install the new blank TP drive, boot the Aronis recovery disk, and then restore from the intermediate drive?

If I do this, will the Recovery Partition be intact/useable and the disk will boot?

Yes, I done this several times. I'm lost as to why you don't want to make an image backup of the drive, however. Image backups as usually faster. When using the recovery disk, you simply let it recreate the disk. If the disk were a larger one, it would expand partitions automatically.

This is where an ultra-bay adapter rules. Going to external USB is pretty slow (both ways) whereas the internal UB allows the backup (and recovery) to occur much faster. These days, I insert new disk in ultrabay, then use acronis ME to clone internal drive to UB. switch drives when successful. Total time - a few minutes to an hour.
-

well....I don't have an UltraBay, nor do I have a SATA enclosure. So, I need to go to an intermediate USB.

Just to clarify...When i boot the Acronis Recovery Disk with the empty/ blank new drive in my TP, I will then tell it to restore from the external USB which has the previously created Backup of all my Partitions.

So, Acronis saves information about the correct placement of these partitions within the backup file? And it also saves all the information to recreate the boot sectors? And the TP Recovery Partition will work properly after? Almost magic if that is so!

Thanks for you input!

I use Acronis myself, and the version I have has a bug in the boot sector creation under Vista-32, wher restoring from USB. The disk is unusable after the restore. I then boot from a retail vista-32 disk and tell him to repair. He fixes it up automatically.

Which version of Acronis do you have? ATI9, 10 or 11, home or workstation, download or retail disc?
I would boot to the Acronis bootable media disc make an image of the whole hard drive and save it on the USB drive, then swap in the new drive, boot to Acronis and restore using the image on the USB drive.
This should give you an exact clone of what you have now.
I do this a couple times a week on various makes of desktops and laptops.
It would be even easier if you could install the new disc and use USB to attach the old disc. Then you could clone directly from the old disc to the new disc without making an image file.

I have 11 Home Retail. Don't want to image, because USB Disk has other stuff on it I need, so don't want image to erase everything.

Will what I mentioned above (backing up all partitions) work? If so, do I need to specify sector by sector copy?

No, you want to create an image file. It will be one file named ~imagename.tib. It will be on your USB disc just like all the other files on there.
Your acronis cd is bootable. Do all your cloning that way. Make an image file of your whole disc including all partitions. Save it on your USB drive. Swap in the new hard drive. Boot up to the acronis cd tell it to restore and point it to the image file. It will restore to the new disc.
If you do not make an image file it will copy your existing hard disc to the USB disc wiping out all your files. Making an image file only adds one very large file to your hard drive.
Make sure your USB drive is not formatted to FAT32 as FAT32 has a max file size of 4gb and your image file will likely be larger than that. Make sure you have plenty of time because cloning to and from a USB disc can take several hours depending on the size of the image file.

Carbon_unit is spot on with this. make the image (image means source disk, not target) and it will create the .tib file. file by file is very SLOW!

Good point on the FAT32 target as well.

I tried doing this and it did not work. I used TrueImage Echo Worktstation build 8 thousand something. I created an image of my hard drive.. booted off the acronis boot media.. when i went to drop the image to another hard drive all went well except it did not boot. I tried this on multiple laptops and everyone was the same scenario. However when I tried with a desktop worked perfectly.

Puma, did you also restore the MBR when you did the disk image restore? On my version Home v. 11, there is an option to restore both the drive and the MBR. I set up the restore operation to restore both. I have gone from disk to disk thisway successfully.

Worked great for me as described guys! Thanks a LOT!!!

Almost magic! I recommend this Acronis Product HIGHLY!!!

puma, True Image Echo Workstation 8 thousand something or other is not the product you want. You want true image home or workstation, no echo. It is not the right product for what you are doing.

carbon_unit wrote:puma, True Image Echo Workstation 8 thousand something or other is not the product you want. You want true image home or workstation, no echo. It is not the right product for what you are doing.

Actually puma, True Image Echo Workstation (8.115) should be just fine and has the same functionallity. This is their corp version that I use on a daily basis and prefer. IIRC, it does cost more than the home version (if you decide to buy).

Thanks for the reply guys, yes this is not the home version, but what am I doing wrong. Where is this option to restore the MBR? I dont see it. Essentially what I would like to do is take an image of my laptop and have it saved as a file and at any time restore it and have it capable of booting.

Puma, when you make the backup there should be a selection for your drive 'C:' and partitions. Make sure you have selected the complete drive (it should select your MBR partition automatically). It will do exactly what you what it to... everything to a single file for recovery.

Click the uppermost square so it becomes solid, and it will automatically select everything below. This IS NOT the default when you go to the selection screem!

Thats what I do.. yet nothing when I go to boot from it. Again with desktops this is fine, with laptops it doesnt work... so frusterating

Puma, a couple of things.

- Are you sure that the "backup" contained the MBR? (I assume so since you wrote that the desktop worked)

- Are you running Vista?

Sorry, most of the time this works really well..

Is the destination drive mounted in the Thinkpad or not?

No, i am not doing a disk to disk. I am creating an image file and then dropping that file back onto the new drive.

Hi all, speaking of True Image: what do folks think is the best version of TI? I remember at one time that TI 9 was not well received and that TI 8 was still considered better. However TI 8 was missing some useful features TI 9 had. Sorry it was a long time ago and I'm very fuzzy now on the forum discussions about this.

Anyway, I know this is not a TI forum, but can anyone compare the later TI 10/11 versions to the older TI 8/9?

Personally I've always used Ghost 2003 and swear by it, but its support for external USB drives is not the greatest. In particular it has issues with NTFS-formatted drives in external USB 2.0 enclosures, which is a pretty big f***ing shortcoming in this day and age. So, to back up our laptops I've always done peer-to-peer over tcp/ip and while that's pretty fast it's a pain in the [censored] to set up with getting the boot floppies right, crossover ethernet cable, etc......

So basically I'm looking for new imaging software that's as reliable as Ghost 2k3 but better support for NTFS external drives in USB 2.0 and/or Firewire-A enclosures and I'd appreciate anyone who has experience with the various TI versions to chime in.

I am a new true image user and I believe I am using version 11. I successfully cloned my 320gb hard drive with no issues. This is how it is set up.
Partition 1: Windows XP
Partition 2: NTFS
Partition 3: ubuntu.

I was very unsure about how this would have cloned with the dual boot but it was perfect in every aspect. I was dreading to have to reinstall everything but with true image, everything was perfect.

puma, I mean when you restore the image, is the hard drive mounted in the Thinkpad?

I have tried it both ways. Initially I tried just imaging the disk outside of the PC then with it installed. Why is there a better way to do this?

Having the hard drive mounted in the drive bay where it will stay if the preferred place. I'm ot sure why you are having so much trouble. It always just works for me.

me neither its very annoying. I used to do this all the time with symantec ghost, and then i moved to acronis because i liked the software better and use it for other purposes except for taking an image of a drive that I would like to eventually boot off of. This sucks because this is a big part of using the software. After a while running tests over and over to gain confidence to use this software gets old since it takes so long to make these images and drop them. i just gave up. thanks for all your replies guys.

I have never successfully been able to restore an Acronis image on a ThinkPad. I always have the blinking cursor. Occasionally when I see another method that I haven't tried before I will give it a go. So far always with the same result, the blinking cursor. What I do for backup is simply make a clone which has worked nicely. Its faster to just drop a cloned drive in anyway but it would be nice if I could get the image to boot.

Brad

As mentioned above, Using Acronis Home 11, I successfully made a a Drive image file from my T61 to an external USB, and then was able to make a bootable disk from the image.

But, for another (still T61) I tried to CLONE the drive to an identical one in a USB enclosure. But, the resultant clone will not boot. The only way I can get it to work, is by doing the "reverse clone"; taking the source out, and putting it in the enclosure, and putting the Clone destination drive in the Thinkpad. Moving forward, this procedure is not acceptable to me.

Is there any way to successively make the clone process work with a destination USB Drive and Acronis? Or is there other software that will do this better? (I don't have an Ultrabay).

Brad wrote:I have never successfully been able to restore an Acronis image on a ThinkPad. I always have the blinking cursor. Occasionally when I see another method that I haven't tried before I will give it a go. So far always with the same result, the blinking cursor. What I do for backup is simply make a clone which has worked nicely. Its faster to just drop a cloned drive in anyway but it would be nice if I could get the image to boot.

Brad

YES! that is exactly what I get!

josh999 wrote:As mentioned above, Using Acronis Home 11, I successfully made a a Drive image file from my T61 to an external USB, and then was able to make a bootable disk from the image.

But, for another (still T61) I tried to CLONE the drive to an identical one in a USB enclosure. But, the resultant clone will not boot. The only way I can get it to work, is by doing the "reverse clone"; taking the source out, and putting it in the enclosure, and putting the Clone destination drive in the Thinkpad. Moving forward, this procedure is not acceptable to me.

Is there any way to successively make the clone process work with a destination USB Drive and Acronis? Or is there other software that will do this better? (I don't have an Ultrabay).

This is exactly what I am looking to do. It looks like it now works when the image is dropped onto the HD installed in the thinkpad but i am looking to be able to drop the image onto the drive while it is connected to as a secondary.