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Recovery from hdd failure

myanmarboy

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Posted October 13, 2011 at 10:16AM

Vista Home Premium with Acronis TI 11 installed. I recently suffered total failure of my internal hdd. Local repairman replaced this with new drive of matching spec and installed the Windows from original recovery discs. I had a full TI back-up image on an external drive, albeit a few months old, but when I tried to restore this it wiped the Windows off and I had to start again from the recovery discs with the pain of all the updates and SP1 and 2 etc. I have researched Acronis until my head spins but cannot get my head around a foolproof regime of ensuring that I can painlessly recover from a hdd failure again - it is what Acronis says on the tin is'nt it. With my new internal I have purchased an external (1tb HP Simple Save which saves my data on an ongoing basis but I really want to be able to restore my system to the state it was in at the last backup point if this happens again. I have looked at cloning but from what I gather I would need to install a second hdd in my pc and reclone after system changes. I would really appreciate any advice/info on this subject from anyone who uses Acronis TI and/or has suffered similar experience.

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johndrew

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Posted October 13, 2011 at 2:31PM

I have used ATI to recover by overwriting a damaged OS with no problems.

Questions:

  1. Where did you backup to?
  2. Was it a 'Full' backup or did you use 'Incremental' or Differential?
  3. Did you 'Validate' the backup on completion?
  4. Was the backup carried out with the same ATI version as made it?
  5. Did you use the CD or boot from an installation of ATI when you made the backup?
  6. When you attempted the 'Recovery' operation what exactly did you have connected and what was the process you used?

I should add that I have never heard of a correctly prepared and validated backup not functioning properly or wiping a drive.

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myanmarboy

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Posted October 13, 2011 at 9:02PM

johndrew, Many thanks for responding. In reply to your questions :- 1. Backup was made to an external drive via USB2 2. Backup was a single "full" backup with no incrementals. 3. Affirmative - backup was validated, and I used the it to recover some of my data. 4. Affirmative - backup made using TI 11, the only version I own or use 5. When I made the backup, I launched TI from All Programs. 6. When I attempted recovery, I had the external drive attached where the .tib file was stored - nothing else. I has reinstalled TI v11 from the original purchased CD and selected Recovery from the opening menu.

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johndrew

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Posted October 14, 2011 at 10:18AM

When you booted from the CD and selected Recovery, you were given a number of locations to recover from; are you certain you selected the backup and not anything else on the external HDD?

To check if the system is working, you could try Recovery of a single file from the external drive to your Desktop (Different Location). If this works I can see no reason for the Recovery operation you attempted to fail.

One other remote possibility, when you did the backup, you did simply select 'C:' and not one of the sub-folders? You should be able to see this if you try the above.

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myanmarboy

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Posted October 15, 2011 at 6:51AM

johndrew/bumpkin, thanks for the responses. I have just tried restoring a single file to my desktop which worked perfectly. Don't know if it's relevant but my Windows is in a separate partition on my drive. Regards cloning. I like the thought of a belt and braces approach and am looking at a having a swappable drive tray fitted next week and cloning to an identical drive. If I do this and subsequently have another failure of my "C", is it just a matter of replacing the failed drive with the clone and also will the system boot from the tray drive? Cheers John B

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johndrew

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Posted October 15, 2011 at 10:16AM

"Don't know if it's relevant but my Windows is in a separate partition on my drive."

Provided you select the correct location to restore to, it doesn't matter that a drive has more than one partition.

As an aside, ATI will also clone drives for you. It is also recognised as the best backup facility by many on these forums.

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