David H. Lipman wrote:
From: "Bill in Co"

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).


Yes. That's the whole idea of an "image".

In fact you can have a 80GB hard disk with 10GB free and image it.

The install a 250GB bare hard disk and restore the image and now have the
same OS on that 250GB hard disk with 180GB free.

I knew it worked well on a functional hard drive, but I didn't know if it
would work ok on a brand new, unformatted and unitialized, hard drive. From
what you're saying it does, and it takes care of all of that automatically.
Which is good to know.

So from that point of view, you don't really ever need a disk CLONE,
assuming you have some image backups, a bootable CD with ATI on it, AND a
brand new hard drive handy.

I guess the only disadvantage of this emergency backup method (i.e., for a
completely ruined defective main hard drive) is that it relies on having a
bootable ATI restore CD handy, and a good reliable image backup on another
drive, AND on having a brand new hard drive handy - instead of just
replacing the drive with a CLONE.