Acronis Vista Restore Didn't Work

"Journey" wrote in message
...
I took an image of my Vista C: drive prior to replacing Vista on my
XPS 410 with a fresh install of XP. I backed up all partitions on the
C: drive.

Since then I added two hard drives. My plan is to have XP on one
drive, Vista on another, and a 3rd for data. I will disable either
the XP or Vista drive in the bios when wanting to switch between the
OS's

I ran into problems when I tried to restore the Vista image to one of
the two new hard drives. Everything seemed to restore OK but when I
tried to boot from it I wasn't able to. I tried everything, different
combinations, restoring only C:. Upon booting a dialog came up asking
if I wanted to repair the installation, restore to a prior system
restore point, and use the Dell recovery partition.

It even went into the Dell recovery partition and restored and said it
was successful, but it wouldn't boot correctly, so it really wasn't
successful.

This was an all-nighter effort. Not really worth it if all I wanted
to do was install Vista. A fresh install is much easier. This was,
however, instended to be a test of my "disaster recovery" procedure. I
wanted to be sure I could do it in a non-emergency situation so that
if things get corrputed in the future I know I can rely on backups.
So, right now I don't have faith in my ability to take backup images
that I can restore to.

I will check the Acronis site to see if there are Vista updates. I
assumed not since I bought it not too long ago, but that is the first
thing I should have checked.

On the positive side, doing a fresh install of Vista was the easiest
install I have ever done. I don't know if the Vista Business CD from
Dell has drivers on that CD. If not, Windows did a great job of
identifying things.

http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/co...plication.html

now with Vista support.............so I assume the only real compatible
version.

On Sat, 07 Apr 2007 15:29:54 -0500, Journey wrote:

I took an image of my Vista C: drive prior to replacing Vista on my
XPS 410 with a fresh install of XP. I backed up all partitions on the
C: drive.

Since then I added two hard drives. My plan is to have XP on one
drive, Vista on another, and a 3rd for data. I will disable either
the XP or Vista drive in the bios when wanting to switch between the
OS's

How was this configured from the Dell factory with hard drives?

I ran into problems when I tried to restore the Vista image to one of
the two new hard drives. Everything seemed to restore OK but when I
tried to boot from it I wasn't able to. I tried everything, different
combinations, restoring only C:. Upon booting a dialog came up asking
if I wanted to repair the installation, restore to a prior system
restore point, and use the Dell recovery partition.

There should have been three partitions restored - the utility
partition first, which is around 40-50MB (I think), the main data
partition (which is the largest), and the last partition which is the
recovery partition and shouldn't be more than 10GB.

It even went into the Dell recovery partition and restored and said it
was successful, but it wouldn't boot correctly, so it really wasn't
successful.

My money is that Vista doesn't like the new drive because it has a
different representation from the original configuration from Dell.
If you were able to run the Dell restore utility, which uses Ghost,
and then on the subsequent boot you got the EULA screen pop up, then
the restore was successful from the partition. The fact you couldn't
subsequently boot is probably because something has changed from the
original configuration that Dell shipped the system with.

Andrew.

On Sat, 07 Apr 2007 19:25:19 -0500, Journey wrote:

On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 18:11:24 -0400, "Phil"
wrote:

I assume that you have an Acronis boot CD. If so, just start over, and only
restore your C: (set to active) partition and MBR. Restore the OS and then
the MBR, in two separate operations. If you have any secondary HDDs, it may
help to disconnect them before booting with the Acronis media.

-phil

Phil -- your instructions worked. I took an image of Vista on Hard
drive 2, then turned Hard drive 2 off in the bios, and did a restore
to hard drive 3 (which had no prior OS). All drives are 250G.

It's strange that doing a whole drive image doesn't work but the OS
and MBR only in separate operations does.

Yes, that is weird. Are these identical drives (same manufacturer,
size etc)? I usually restore the drive by clicking on the actual
disk, which chooses all the relevant options for me (ticks
everything).

Glad you got it sorted in the end.
Andrew.

On Sun, 08 Apr 2007 13:22:11 +0100, Andrew Hodgson
wrote:

There should have been three partitions restored - the utility
partition first, which is around 40-50MB (I think), the main data
partition (which is the largest), and the last partition which is the
recovery partition and shouldn't be more than 10GB.

It even went into the Dell recovery partition and restored and said it
was successful, but it wouldn't boot correctly, so it really wasn't
successful.

My money is that Vista doesn't like the new drive because it has a
different representation from the original configuration from Dell.

Yes -- it has those 3 partitions, plus the MBR. I used Acronis
version 10. I think, even though the drives were the same size, that
it was a configuration problem.

The solution is in another post. I will do my backups using that
method, but I will not rely totally on Acronis. I will also back up
all my data using simple drag and drop to external sources.

On Sun, 08 Apr 2007 16:45:53 -0500, Journey wrote:

The solution is in another post. I will do my backups using that
method, but I will not rely totally on Acronis. I will also back up
all my data using simple drag and drop to external sources.

Fwiw, I backup the data partition on this machine every day using
Rsync (though this is a bit ott), then using Acronis possibly once a
month, less if I haven't done anything too drastic to the OS.

Thanks.
Andrew.

On Sun, 08 Apr 2007 22:52:43 +0100, Andrew Hodgson
wrote:

On Sun, 08 Apr 2007 16:45:53 -0500, Journey wrote:

The solution is in another post. I will do my backups using that
method, but I will not rely totally on Acronis. I will also back up
all my data using simple drag and drop to external sources.

Fwiw, I backup the data partition on this machine every day using
Rsync (though this is a bit ott), then using Acronis possibly once a
month, less if I haven't done anything too drastic to the OS.

Thanks.
Andrew.

I think I am going to revisit Second Copy. I used that for a while
but I set up a complicated scheme. I kept the original and backup in
sync, but in order to protect against accidental mass deletion I had
to specify a 3rd location where deleted files would go. I wanted to
avoid lengthy mass copies between a hard disk and an external one.

I will look at Rsync -- I think that's open source so it might be
interesting to try.

On Sun, 08 Apr 2007 18:45:44 -0500, Journey wrote:

On Sun, 08 Apr 2007 22:52:43 +0100, Andrew Hodgson
wrote:

On Sun, 08 Apr 2007 16:45:53 -0500, Journey wrote:

The solution is in another post. I will do my backups using that
method, but I will not rely totally on Acronis. I will also back up
all my data using simple drag and drop to external sources.

Fwiw, I backup the data partition on this machine every day using
Rsync (though this is a bit ott), then using Acronis possibly once a
month, less if I haven't done anything too drastic to the OS.

Thanks.
Andrew.

I think I am going to revisit Second Copy. I used that for a while
but I set up a complicated scheme. I kept the original and backup in
sync, but in order to protect against accidental mass deletion I had
to specify a 3rd location where deleted files would go. I wanted to
avoid lengthy mass copies between a hard disk and an external one.

I will look at Rsync -- I think that's open source so it might be
interesting to try.

Never used Second Copy, Rsync is very good, but remember if you delete
the files from the source, they are removed from the target if you ask
it to mirror the source. Here I Rsync up to a Linux box and the Rsync
is done at the Linux end, but I have a Rsync running via CWRsync at
work and both using Windows boxes. I also use this to mirror my MP3
player, because I am fed up of adding tracks to my MP3 directory, then
forgetting to copy a specific directory to the player (as I don't want
to copy the whole 40gb or so each time).

Another option which I also use at work (because it handles
permissions better) is the free Robocopy from the Windows resource
kit. It has the /mir option, which is equivalent to the --delete
options in Rsync. It does however transfer the complete changed file
to the destination if it has been changed, unlike Rsync, which only
transfers the specific bytes that have changed from the last copy.

Andrew.

Yes, what version of Acronis you use?

Recently , my boss reported to me, that he had also problems restoring
images done with acronis 8 and 9. All got messed up.

After taking acronis 10 (think it is the latest) all does work as
expected.


However: even with any other similar tool (like ghost or drive image)
, restoring more then one bootable and at the time of the restore
operation not hidden partition will cause problems. After restoring
system partition 1, one has to care this one is hidden and not seen as
boot system when restoring the other one.