[dencorso]

I'm around, JorgeA and BlouBul... but this week I've got my hands full.
Maybe on Friday I'll be able to give you both the attention you deserve.
Meanwhile, connect your new drives and find out how they came formatted and partitioned: I'm betting they came as NTFS and with a single full size partition. Is that so?

[JorgeA]

Hey dencorso,

Glad to learn you're OK!

I guess that now it's your turn to be busy.

I'll check the info you requested and get back to you.

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

dencorso, on 25 October 2010 - 10:03 PM, said:

Meanwhile, connect your new drives and find out how they came formatted and partitioned: I'm betting they came as NTFS and with a single full size partition. Is that so?

dencorso,

Yes, you're right on both counts. Of course, that size billed as "1TB" is actually 931GB, but's who's counting?


--JorgeA

[dencorso]

Yeah, I thought so...

Well, 1 TB is 1 x 1000^4 (and all disk manufacturers do count in using decimal prefixes, there was a class suit against that in the far past, but since that's been settled, nobody can pretend to be deceived by it anymore), so: 1 TB = 1 x 1000^4 = 931.33 x 1024^3 = 931.33 GiB (as advertised).

No, seriously, a 931 GiB NTFS partition can be OK iff ("iff" meaning "if, and only if") you won't later want it to be compatible with Win 9x/ME. So consider it carefully, and decide. For compatibility with 9x/ME it would necessary to repartition it (two 466 GiB partitions would suffice, but three 310 GiB could be even better) and format the new partitions as FAT-32. However FAT-32 has the 4 GiB -1 byte file size limit, which NTFS has not. This is a decision you'd better take now, while it is painless, because, after you start filling the disk, any such changes become a big PITA.

[JorgeA]

Hi dencorso,

Thanks for the explanation. I knew about the math part (it's still annoying!), but not the legal angle.

As for how to format this external HDD (NTFS vs. FAT32), I think we'll leave it as NTFS because it's going to serve as a repository for images of my Vista HDD. If the time ever comes to install a really big external HDD on the Win98, I can get a whole new one for it.

I'm thinking that maybe I can fit more than one HDD image on that 1TB drive, so that in theory I could have multiple places to jump back to if there should ever be a catastrophic problem with the Vista's HDD. I could do a monthly image, for example, and rotate (delete) the older ones out as new ones are created.

--JorgeA

[dencorso]

You sure can fit many more images than just one on the 1 TB HDD! What's the size of your Vista boot partition (viz.: "the C: drive") and how full is it?

[JorgeA]

dencorso,

Well, that's where I'm not sure how this image backup idea is supposed to work, exactly.

The HDD is 500GB (or in reality, 454GB ) but only about 129GB of it is used. (The physical disk also has an 11GB D: recovery partition.) So depending on how the backup works, I could fit either two images or up to seven images.

Explaining this stuff is where you come in.

--JorgeA

[dencorso]

Sure. I'll explain it better shortly, but at this point I'd say that a compressed full-disk image may turn out to be about 150 GB and a boot-partition image may be just under 100 GB, for your system, in the best case. But we'll only really know it after actually making one such image. Do read carefully the Acronis docs looking for compressed images, full disk images, and partition images. During the week-end we can do some experimenting, starting on Friday, OK?

[JorgeA]

dencorso,

That sounds good. Although I should warn that, more often than not, my wife has activities planned for us for the weekend. I'll try to work around that!

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

dencorso, on 27 October 2010 - 12:30 AM, said:

Do read carefully the Acronis docs looking for compressed images, full disk images, and partition images. During the week-end we can do some experimenting, starting on Friday, OK?

dencorso,

You asked me to go through the Acronis documentation. I purchased the Western Digital Elements 1TB external HDD. Does that affect which software's docs I should be studying (such as, possibly, WD's own instead of Acronis)? I'm guessing here that the best thing is to read the documentation for the software that we'll actually be using, but I could well be wrong.

--JorgeA

[BlouBul]

Hi dencorso,

I tried it so long using Acronis True Image 2011 and Disk Director 11. I made a full sector by sector image of my disk, while running the computer from same disk (as my cd drive is not currently working). I partitioned my 2TB external HDD in 2x 500GB and 1 x 863 GB partitions. I restored the Image to the one empty 500 GB partition and set the partition as primary and active. Then I set my computer to boot from USB first to see if the Image work, but for some reason it is not bootable. What am I doing wrong? Can you boot from an external hdd?

This post has been edited by BlouBul: 28 October 2010 - 02:36 AM

[dencorso]

Well, it's complicated...
1) It's not possible to make a sound full-disk "dumb" sector-by-sector image of one HDD while running the OS from it, at the same time. While the OS is running, it's changing files, so the image is doomed to be unsound. It's a physical impossibility.
2) A sound, known-good image is guaranteed to boot from exactly the same disk as it was acquired from. Booting from USB is a totally different animal. Read this, for a starter.
3) I'd love to elaborate, but simply cannot, right now. So, sorry for being terse!

[BlouBul]

dencorso, on 28 October 2010 - 12:26 PM, said:

Well, it's complicated...

Reading your link (and links from your link), I have to agree. But still think it is doable (even for me)

dencorso, on 28 October 2010 - 12:26 PM, said:

1) It's not possible to make a sound full-disk "dumb" sector-by-sector image of one HDD while running the OS from it, at the same time. While the OS is running, it's changing files, so the image is doomed to be unsound. It's a physical impossibility.

I'll take my hdd to work tomorrow and put it as a second internal hdd in my work computer to do a better clone. I thought Acronis had a way to do it, especially as it didn't complain, but was obviously mistaken

dencorso, on 28 October 2010 - 12:26 PM, said:

2) A sound, known-good image is guaranteed to boot from exactly the same disk as it was acquired from. Booting from USB is a totally different animal. Read this, for a starter.

I'll try karionix's method with the new image...

dencorso, on 28 October 2010 - 12:26 PM, said:

3) I'd love to elaborate, but simply cannot, right now. So, sorry for being terse!

Thanks, you have helped a lot with that link. You are not terse - one link is worth a thousand words!

[dencorso]

Sorry... I wasn't able to be here much yesterday.

Quote

I thought Acronis had a way to do it, especially as it didn't complain, but was obviously mistaken.

No, not in fact. Acronis may have figured out a way to do images from a live system. Many providers of imaging tools have done it by now. And they may be good enough for most uses, but are not *bulletproof* images.
Only "dumb" byte-by-byte images are really bulletproof, as far as anything can be. "Intelligent" images make suppositions which may not always hold.
And it is *impossible* to do a "dumb" byte-by-byte image from a live system, because, by definition, if it's live, it'll be changing files while it works (unless it runs entirely in ROM, but, then, you'd have no need to image it).

So, it's a hard impossibility (or impossibility of the first kind): we do know it cannot be done.

Bear in mind that, by contrary, when one faces a soft impossibility (or impossibility of the second kind), there's some place for optmism, because, then, one would know there's no evident obstacle for the deed being done, although nobody, up to that moment, has figured how to do it, and described it, nor does one have any idea of how to do it oneself...

[BlouBul]

No Prob. I was also a bit busy yesterday. And to top that, I made my hdd not bootable. I always had a MBR Error 3 when I boot up, but since everything still worked, I didn't worry too much. A quick google search didn't help too much, so I left it...

Trying to be good on Friday, I took my hdd to work, put it as an xtra ide hdd in my work computer and imaged it again (this time "dead" as oppose to live). While trying to extract the image to the external, I did it on my internal (the "same" one as the image) as well. It didn't worry me too much, as it should end up as the same as previous and thought it would be a good method of testing. Then I did the same on my external. It still did not want to boot even though I tried karionix's method. (missing operating system or something like that. The I tried to boot from the IDE drive. This time it stops after the MBR Error 3 and doesn't want to boot! I thought it might have been something with the different computer being an AMD (I read somewhere that fix didn't work so well with AMD's). When I came home my home pc also didn;t want to boot from that hdd.

I sort of expected that, so brought a dvd drive home and reinstalled Windows and everything (I have a full image of all my data now, and I have been putting a full format and reinstall off for a while now as I wanted to get rid of all the accumulated junk.) Will try to image the newly formatted drive now and see if I have better results now. The MBR Error 3 at least is gone now. (think I killed a fly with a sledgehammer, but at least it worked)

When I did the image "dead", I did a sector-by sector image, but opt not to do the free space. I guess that made the image not so "dumb" anymore and put a spanner in the works. Next time I'll try to image everyting..

[dencorso]

@JorgeA and BlouBul:
I'm unusually busy this week, too, somewhat to my surprise (but I'm not complaining, far from it...).
However, I began talking about imaging with AnnieMS in this other thread, and so I'm inviting you all over to that thread, so that we can discuss imaging in just one single place. As soon as you're both confortable with imaging, then we can move back here and finish this troubleshooting. Would that be OK for you?

[JorgeA]

dencorso,

That's very OK with me, thanks!

I went through the thread with AnnieMS. What a frustrating problem. My only quibble is that one of the links you gave her, when I clicked on it, instead of taking me to a sticky thread about disk imaging, it took me to a short thread about MSN Messenger.

And as far as being unexpectedly busy this week -- ride the wave for all it's worth!!

--JorgeA

[dencorso]

JorgeA, on 03 November 2010 - 09:08 PM, said:

when I clicked on it, instead of taking me to a sticky thread about disk imaging, it took me to a short thread about MSN Messenger.

Thanks for the heads up! It's fixed now!
I was another victim of the dreaded "revenge of cut & paste": the right thread is #100299, while the wrong one is #10029...

[JorgeA]

dencorso,

dencorso, on 03 November 2010 - 10:47 PM, said:

Thanks for the heads up! It's fixed now!

You're welcome. Glad to be of service!

dencorso, on 03 November 2010 - 10:47 PM, said:

I was another victim of the dreaded "revenge of cut & paste": the right thread is #100299, while the wrong one is #10029...

Oh, I know what THAT's like...

I'll check out that thread tomorrow (Thursday).

--JorgeA

[BlouBul]

No problem, was a bit busy myself this week. I'll see you there. Another option is to rather start a new thread about disk imaging and then move back to the respective threads thereafter. (That might help future searches on the topic)