Image Restore

[OldGuy]

Win XP Pro

Using any of the Imaging app like Macrium Reflect Free or EaseUS ToDo
or Acronis Backup.

I created an Image of a failing HDD. That worked. I am trying to
create another image using a different app so I have at least two
images.

Now to restore to a new HDD.

How do I do this to a new, no partition, unformatted HHD and make it
bootable.

I have a VANTEC USB3 to SATA adapter. Can I restore to this drive
through the USB / SATA adapter? Or do I need to go the way of creating
a boot recovery disk and install the blank HDD in the laptop and then
do a recovery?

 

[Paul]

Win XP Pro

Using any of the Imaging app like Macrium Reflect Free or EaseUS ToDo or
Acronis Backup.

I created an Image of a failing HDD. That worked. I am trying to
create another image using a different app so I have at least two images.

Now to restore to a new HDD.

How do I do this to a new, no partition, unformatted HHD and make it
bootable.

I have a VANTEC USB3 to SATA adapter. Can I restore to this drive
through the USB / SATA adapter? Or do I need to go the way of creating
a boot recovery disk and install the blank HDD in the laptop and then do
a recovery?

Any backup software that supports "bare metal restore",
comes with its own boot CD. That's how, if all you have
is your copy of the backup file, you insert the boot CD
and boot with it, then restore to the blank hard drive.

Macrium comes with its own boot CD. You have to burn that and
have it ready for emergencies. I have one sitting right next to me.

A few products also come with BartPE plugins, and you can then
add the plugin to your BartPE build setup. Then, boot the machine
with Bart and do the restore. I have a copy of NTBackup
on a BartPE CD, for restoring from an NTBackup file.

That's the basic idea.

Even Windows 7 System Image, encourages you to make a recovery
CD, and the restore can be run from there. You boot that
CD, and it offers to restore for you. To that new blank hard
drive.

If backup software didn't come with a boot CD, it would be
(relatively) useless.

If you make the Macrium WinPE boot CD, it even has the
option to clone drives in there. So you can do a disk
to disk copy, without a running OS. All by booting the
recovery CD. Some backup software, may only have restore
provided on the boot CD, and that's the bare minimum level
of functionality.

As long as you have a host with a USB connector on it,
you could use your VANTEC for the work. The only thing
crude enough to not support USB, would be something
from the MSDOS era.

Where the boot CDs fall down a bit, is their ability to
access file shares. If you have a NAS with the backup
file on it, then not many (cheap) backup softwares
can get at it. Using a file share is a bit more "advanced"
as far as the marketing manager for the software is concerned.

You're floating in a sea of capabilities here, and should
be able to whip together some sort of solution.

Paul

 

[BillW50]

OldGuy wrote: [...]
If backup software didn't come with a boot CD, it would be
(relatively) useless.

Not to me. Sure I too use a boot CD a lot (for cloning and backups). But
if it isn't available for whatever reason, it isn't really a big deal.
As long as you can connect a source and a destination drives to a
machine with the proper OS, you are usually good to go.

 

[Zo]

OldGuy formulated on Saturday :

I do have the Macrium Reflect Free Boot CD as both a Win and Linux version.
So it is good to go.

I made the image to a NAS on my LAN. I also made it to a USB2 drive.
Hoping one will be much faster than the other.

When I tried the clone, I was unable to get a completion from any clone SW I
tried. I was able to get an image using Macrium Reflect free and one other
imager. I hope the image will work.

Note: the WD Blue 500G drive that died after two months was replace in a
lightening fast three days with a WD Blue 750G drive. Either they were out
of the 500G or made a mistake or felt bad and up-sized me.
Anyway, I will hold that drive in reserve as I am using a WD Black 500g (5 yr
warrantee)

Hope you have success, if not, this one saved me in restoring my system
after a botched linux dual boot installation.

Redo Backup and Recovery

http://redobackup.org/

 

[Mayayana]

As you probably know by now, you should have done
the disk imaging before, not when the disk is dying. If
possible it would be better to just reinstall and *then*
make a disk image for next time, with a fresh install.
And make partitions. And don't keep your data on C drive.
And preferably use two disks in the future. If you can't
recover from a failed hard disk or a hopelessly broken
Windows install then you don't have backup.

 

[Bob F]

As you probably know by now, you should have done
the disk imaging before, not when the disk is dying. If
possible it would be better to just reinstall and *then*
make a disk image for next time, with a fresh install.
And make partitions. And don't keep your data on C drive.
And preferably use two disks in the future. If you can't
recover from a failed hard disk or a hopelessly broken
Windows install then you don't have backup.

Or, he could do a repair install over the recovered OS, then to all the updates
from Microsoft.

 

[OldGuy]

Mayayana pretended :

As you probably know by now, you should have done
the disk imaging before, not when the disk is dying. If
possible it would be better to just reinstall and *then*
make a disk image for next time, with a fresh install.
And make partitions. And don't keep your data on C drive.
And preferably use two disks in the future. If you can't
recover from a failed hard disk or a hopelessly broken
Windows install then you don't have backup.

Not much of a masochist here so public spanking is ignored.
Anyway, you are not up on the entire saga.

Imaging takes 8 hours to USB and 10 hours to restore from USB.
Why would I want to endure that wear and tear on myself or the HDD and
destination very often when I can make vital only data backups as
needed?

1 way back made images and data backup
2 original HDD started failing
3 cloned to a new WD Blue
4 WD Blue died after two months
5 original still viable so put back in to clone.
6 clone finished but not bootable
7 made additional images to USB and LAN from failing HDD. all went
well. i installed several large apps after last image.
8 restored to new WD Blue replacement using USB since LAN drivers were
not immediately available. (short coming of Macrium Reflect Free to
warn about needed drivers when making Image).
9 restored replacement WD Blue boots and runs.
10 now just looking for assurances that the OS and apps are good.

Rather let Image and Restore run over two nights than sit at laptop
installing/downloading everything from scratch. So manual all install
was a last resort.
And since all my vital data is backed up multiple places every time I
use it I had no fear of losing that.
I have an app that backs up a file whenever it is changed.

 

[Bob F]

Mayayana pretended :

Not much of a masochist here so public spanking is ignored.
Anyway, you are not up on the entire saga.

Imaging takes 8 hours to USB and 10 hours to restore from USB.
Why would I want to endure that wear and tear on myself or the HDD and
destination very often when I can make vital only data backups as
needed?

I make regular image backups of my C: drive using Seagate Discwizard running in
windows, each of which takes about 50 minutes over USB 2 to my USB backup drive.
That's to backup about 95 GB of data. IIRC, it might take 3 times that to
restore using the Bootable recovery CD made by Discwizard.

I'm not sure why your backup would take so much longer unless you have a huge
disk.

I wonder if the bootable CD version might not take advantage of DMA access to
your disk? Also, you may have the program verifying everything it writes, which
will at least double the time required. I have not found this to be necessary.

I keep images recent because they make recovery from problems SO MUCH easier and
faster, and problems are bound to happen.

 

[Mayayana]

| Imaging takes 8 hours to USB and 10 hours to restore from USB.
| Why would I want to endure that wear and tear on myself or the HDD and
| destination very often when I can make vital only data backups as
| needed?
|

I guess you know what's best for you. I use BootIt
and keep a C drive image only of Windows plus installed
software. (About 2.5 GB + 2.5 GB space) I back up
data from other partitions to DVDs. My images take about
10 minutes to make and about 10 minutes to restore.

 

[Paul]

I make regular image backups of my C: drive using Seagate Discwizard running in
windows, each of which takes about 50 minutes over USB 2 to my USB backup drive.
That's to backup about 95 GB of data. IIRC, it might take 3 times that to
restore using the Bootable recovery CD made by Discwizard.

I'm not sure why your backup would take so much longer unless you have a huge
disk.

I wonder if the bootable CD version might not take advantage of DMA access to
your disk? Also, you may have the program verifying everything it writes, which
will at least double the time required. I have not found this to be necessary.

I keep images recent because they make recovery from problems SO MUCH easier and
faster, and problems are bound to happen.

When doing backups, you can split out the compression step
and do it later.

Macrium Reflect has a lightweight compressor in software. As
it prepares the .mrimg of the disk, it will do compression.
You can turn that off. With the compression turned off, I can
make a backup at around 50MB/sec. About 10 minutes is enough
to back up the 26GB C: on my Win8 install.

After my backup is finished, I can compress with 7-ZIP
(makes .mrimg.7z) . Which could take a long time. The main
disadvantage of using 7-ZIP, is I can't turn the computer off entirely.
I could hibernate or sleep it, if I wanted the computer to take a break.
But there's no ability to pause a 7-ZIP compression and pick up where
it left off later.

And this means, when doing backups, you look at all the "plumbing"
in the path, and try to arrange the various stages (initial copy,
compression, copy of final file to final destination) as best
you can.

On the later OSes, it's possible for background "maintenance" tasks,
to hijack what you're doing and slow it down. WinXP doesn't
tend to do this. On WinXP, you could turn off your AV during the
backup, but I don't know if the AV would actually bother scanning
block level access of a VSS based backup or not. Whereas on
Windows 8, the "tiworker" process will likely start reading
entire packages off the disk, which conflicts with other
activities on the machine. And some maintenance tasks on
Win8 are "very persistent". They won't take no for an answer.
For example, the Search Indexer, even when you tell it to
pause, you can catch it occasionally stealing cycles. If
you're a Win8 owner, you really have to keep Task Manager
open all the time, to find out where your performance is
going. If you have a computer with 16 cores and an SSD
drive for C:, then probably none of this matters.

Paul