TrueImage 11 home-how to restore image

[brent2]

hello,
I am new to imaging although quite experienced in many pc areas. I have just purchased this program and got it to successfully create and verify images onto external hard drives. My question of which I cannot really find an answer is that I have one hard drive and my OS is on one of two partitions, the C drive, 24GB. The other D (drive) partition is just used for storage.
If my C drive became corrupted could I then restore its image from my external HD, would the corrupted C have to be first wiped clean or would the image overwrite it. Would it do this from windows or would I have to use the boot disc?
It says there must be no activity on the hd when the image is being restored, how do I do this?
Thanks.
brent2

 

[DaveBurnett]

You would have to run it from CD and you should check that doing so can read the external drive with the images before you need it.
No it will overwrite.
No activity means that you cannot be running from that partition - which you wouldn't be if booting from CD.

 

[brent2]

Hello, Much appreciated, you have made it all clear to me now, thanks.
brent2

 

[Elvandil]

Recovery is the point, of course, so it's good practice to boot from the CD and be sure that your devices are all loaded (and have the proper drivers in Acronis) so that you can restore when you need to.

 

[brent2]

Hello again. Thanks also to Elvandil. I have tried the way Dave suggested and all worked ok. But now I have installed the image on a little larger C partition (30Gb compared to original of about 23Gb) on a larger HD. I have installed it and all seems to work except that on starting I get this message "The system partition has different symbol from saved one. Please reinstall to fix the issue". Does that mean I should have created a partition with the exact same size as original?
brent2

 

[DaveBurnett]

I wouldn't worry about it. It is because it is a different disk.

 

[brent2]

Thanks again, What seemed a difficult task has now fallen into place.
brent2

 

[Elvandil]

Keeping the image on the same drive as the system doesn't offer any protection if the drive fails. So it is always advisable to use a separate drive. In some systems where I have an OS on each of 2 drives, I use the other drive for the backups, so C: is backed up to G: and G: to C: (dedicated partitions). An external is preferable, but chances are that both drives will not fail at the same time.

 

[brent2]

Thanks again for these snippets of information, from all of you. I seem to have managed the procedure. I have three external HD's and I am using those for backups. I have made backup images using DriveImage XML but never reinstated them, but I do like True Image now I have it.
By the way the window I got about a different system partition symbol has just disappeared.

 

[Elvandil]

I've never heard of anyone actually restoring an image from DriveImage XML successfully. That's will be my next experiment. I have used Clonezilla on Vista and it worked fine.

But whenever I test these things, I use Acronis to make a backup first in case the tested program doesn't work as advertized.

But there are many good programs for imaging, including Macrium, ShadowProtect, Paragon, and many more. But creating the image is never the problem. It is how you can restore that is pivotal to the process. There are some excellent programs that just don't have drivers for some media I use for backup, so they are useless to me. The best thing to do is boot from your recovery media and see if it works. With Acronis, you can boot the CD and then verify the image to be sure that it will be recognized as valid when the time comes to restore. I had one image that was invalid and didn't find out until it was too late.

 

[brent2]

I also created a bootable cd with Barts PE and a plugin of DriveImage XML. This works fine but I have only played with it and not yet restored an image. The program does allow creating a virtual drive where you can view the image contents and if necessary extract files.
I have also created an image with Macrium but not re installed it. I have a computer with no access to the internet and tried to install Macrium on it, but can't, it will only install with an internet access.
If you do try DriveImage please post results.