Rescue & Recovery on T41p with external HD

[acz]

After reading a number of posts about Rapid Restore and Rescue and Recovery, etc. I think I have confused myself completely.

I got a new T41p in December 2004, and I have not yet created any external backups. I assume that the factory hidden partition is here, because my 60GB hard drive [ the label is IBM_PRELOAD ] shows a capacity of 52.4 GB. I see here under Start, Programs, Access IBM there is an entry for Rescue & Recovery version 2.02.0178, but I have never used the program past the welcome screen.

Lenovo seems to have a newer version 2.04.0182, which is a 400 meg download.

I would like to back up my T41p on to an external WD hard drive connected via USB. But I think I read that the R&R program will format the external drive, which I want to avoid because that drive already contains data from my other PC, created by the SyncBack freeware program.

Can anyone clarify whether R&R will indeed format the external drive and generally advise on how to proceed ?
Thank you!

[GomJabbar]

Here is a link where I posted my experience upgrading R&R from version 1 to version 3.

Rescue and Recovery v2.0 User Guide

ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery 3.0 - User's Guide

AKAIK backing up to an external hard drive will not result in it being formatted. I believe it is in the Restore procedure that the target drive may be reformatted and possibly repartitioned - depending upon the choices made. One thing for sure, if you restore using the Recovery Disc set, the target drive will be repartitioned and reformatted resulting in any data there being lost.

[ashleys]

You should have no problems with what you're proposing.
I use Rescue and Recovery and take backups to my external HD in a USB enclosure. I only ever take base level backups (no incrementals) and use R&R to just backup my system volume. All user data is on another partition and is archived using xcopy.

If you wished to create the R&R rescue media (R&R pre-desktop environment) then that would have formatted your external HD. In fact it never recognised the drive was paritioned and just wiped the whole drive. However, Release 3 both has the option to create rescue media to a USB device without erasing the existing data *AND* it recognises existing partitions. I've upgraded to Release 3 and now have my USB HD partitioned as two volumes,

F: - Contains rescue media image (R&R bootable environment) and the RRUbackups
G: - All user data archived by xcopy

Ashley.

[acz]

Are you saying that R&R 3 created the two partitions on a USB drive that previously had only one partition?
Or did you have to create the two partitions with some other tool first?

Thank you Ashleys.

[nomadees]

If we recover into factory conditions, will the second partition be removed and all the date erased?? thanks

[Zeitgeist]

As far as I remember the software asks you whether you want to format the whole hdd including all paritions or only the system partition.

Just try it- you will be always asked if you want to continue.

[GomJabbar]

If you use the Recovery Disc Set (CD's), it will repartition and reformat your hard drive, erasing all data.

Restoring from the Rescue and Recovery area on the hard drive gives you more options. The latest version 3 is the most flexible in the options available. I believe I read that some of the earlier versions will remove existing partitions without notification.