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Thread: Boot drive imaging and OS backup

  1. #1
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    Question Boot drive imaging and OS backup

    Hi everyone,

    I am, for the second time in two years, attempting data recovery from an intel matrix raid 0 setup. This is a big PITA, as my C drive is 1TB with 2x500GB sammys.

    I am getting read errors from one of the drives, so after buying a new 1TB drive to dump the data to, I will be doing a clean install of windows on a new drive, and from there I will run the data recovery.

    My plan for the future is to have a small (60Gb?) fast drive (OCZ vertex?) and I will install everything I need on it. then I will create a backup image that I can put on whatever drive I want my boot drive to be. However, I suspect its not that simple...

    My question is:

    How do you create boot drive images so that you dont need to re-install everything everytime you crash?

    What software is best for this? Arconis true image?

    Are there any good guides to show someone who is happy to install raid drivers, build a pc ect how to do this?

    Also how failproof is this method? would an image from a normal HDD transfer correctly onto an SSD and boot? or would stuff that I dont fully understand like boot flags and sector size and partition alignment cause problems?

    Please Help!

    Regards,

    Chris

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    Re: Boot drive imaging and OS backup

    Your computer, as far as i know, shouldn't be able to tell the difference between an SSD and a normal hard drive - so that shouldn't be a problem. The problem with simply mirroring your hard drive, i'd have thought, is that you run the risk of mucking up your master boot record when you try to boot from the backup. If you do a perfect mirror of the hard drive then there shouldn't be any major issues - but you might have to run "fixmbr" or something to that effect from the windows install disk (boot from the disk and go into diagnostic mode or whatever it's called these days).

    What you're planning shouldn't cause you too much of a problem, just as mentioned you may have to run a couple of diagnostic tools once you set the BIOS to boot from your backup drive.

    Have a look at the free options before you dive into Acronis: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

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    Re: Boot drive imaging and OS backup

    Hi, I can see there are a few 'disc cloning' applications on the UBCD, but which one is best for what I want? I am new to imaging, but I imagine being able to store an image of my C drive on a backup drive, and have the option to restore my system back to it. I will probably limit my partition size to something manageable like 60GB as this should be plenty for OS + Productivity + Games. All other data will be stored seperately. I will then update my backup image after any major new installation, and recover from that image as nessicary (system failure/HDD upgrade ect)

    The fee HDClone says it will only clone to a new, larger disk, G4U looks perfect but seems to be aimed at FTP deployment. CloneMAX will only copy a complete HDD. I really want to be able to just copy system partition + MBR and other stuff that makes it boot. If there is a way to do this with the stuff on UBCD, do you have a link to a nice friendly guide at all?

    Also I dont mind paying for software, I just want to know that it will do what I need, and not be to user-un-friendly. But if it can be done free, all the better!

  4. #4
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    Re: Boot drive imaging and OS backup

    It can be done free with dd and a linux livecd, but if you want something simple then I'm afraid this is another time when I point to Acronis. Give the trial a whirl and see what you think.

    One think you do need to be aware of is that an image isn't just a copy of the data on the disk - you couldn't just copy the image file back if you needed to re-install or similar. Usually you boot from a CD or USB key and point it at the image file, and tell it where to restore to, then it will unpack the image and restore to the disk in question.

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    Re: Boot drive imaging and OS backup

    Well I can't find much cheaper and simpler than the linux live CD solution, BUT it does take a little knowledge of Linux to do it - there is a risk of getting it wrong and overwriting the source disk with the target. But there are other cloning programs out there, some free, some not, but I guess most do what they say.

    However fr me the plus of the linux solution is that teh spurce disk file systems are not mounted, the disk (as far as an OS is concerned) is entirely quiescent so the clone is a en exact logical copy of the source.
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