On 3/20/2012 7:20 PM, Bill in Co wrote:
I'm a little confused about this seemingly basic issue, in this case
involving the use of Acronis True Image and its backup images, but it could
be more general, too.

Is it possible to restore an image backup of your system to a *completely
brand new hard drive* that has never been used or initialized? Let me
explain further:

Suppose your main hard drive dies, and that you also have another HD that
only contains some Acronis True Image backups of your system stored on it,
AND that you also have an Acronis True Image Boot CD handy.

So you replace the bad drive with a brand new drive (which naturally is
unbootable if you just tried to boot up on it).

However, using your Acronis boot CD, you can use that to boot up into the
boot CD, and then presumably select a backup image you'd like to restore
from the other HD.

BUT will the restore operation work for a brand new virgin hard drive that
has never been used before (i.e. make the brand new hard drive bootable into
windows, etc)? I'm guessing it will, but that's only an assumption on my
part. I know the operation works well on a normal HD, but have never tried
it out on a brand new hard drive, and am wondering if there is some
limitation there I'm not aware of (like you can't restore an image to a
virgin hard drive that has never been initialized or whatever).

If you backup just the partition, no! Although you should be able to fix
it with a XP install CD (not a recovery disc in most cases). With
Acronis True Image you need to backup the whole drive (MBR, Boot,
System, etc) except any partition (if you have more) that you don't care
about.

NOTE ABOUT ACRONIS: It will fail to restore (only) with some USB drives.
All other functions will work perfectly. So you would know until to try
to restore. So go through the motions and at the point to pick the
backup to restore and it can find the USB drive, you are good. So you
don't have to do the actual restore to find out if your USB drive will
work or not. Sometimes it will work with some one day and the next day, no.

Having said all of the above, it still can fail for veriest reasons.
Because of this, I throw in a spare drive and test it out to make sure
everything is ok when I test to see if the restores are ok. Most people
don't bother and learn the hard way like I used to.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - Thunderbird v3.0
Centrino Core2 Duo T7400 2.16 GHz - 1.5GB - Windows 8 CP