Paul wrote:
Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:59:32 -0600, "Bill in Co"
wrote:

Let's suppose you have a disk with 4 partitions on it. AFAIK, you can
either clone the disk (the entire disk), or choose which partitions to
image, but not image the whole disk in one image, and one simple
operation,
unless I'm missing something.

Yes, you're missing something. When you choose to create an image, you
can select one partition, multiple partitions, all partitions, or the
entire disk.


Some irrelevant trivia. (This is for CHS compliant hard drives,
rather than a layout for an SSD. A good SSD layout, doesn't use
multiples of 63.)

MBR GRUB Boot Stage First Partition Starts
Sector 0 Sector 1..62 Sector 63... etc.

If you back up an operating system partition, that misses the MBR,
which has an initial element used for booting. There is 440 bytes
of code in there. For WinXP (this group), it can be put back
with "fixmbr c:" from the recovery console.

There might be other things hiding in sector 1 to 62, so you
have to be careful about those as well. If some OS needs something
from there, then again, failure to back that up, may require a
"repair" procedure to put it back. I understand one of the two
versions of GRUB for Linux, puts something in there. A tool
like "dd", for either Windows or Linux, can surgically back up
chunks like that, if you need it done.

Some OSes, have geometry or offset information stored in the
OS partition. The result of moving the partition, like offsetting
it a different amount on the new hard drive, may be a failure to boot.

So while you can fool around at the single partition level, you need
a good understanding if any other dependencies.

So this is what is worrying me. This at least suggests the possibility
that restoring an image backup of your system to a brand new hard drive may
not result in a bootable drive (assuming you simply selected C: as the
partition to backup, which is what the choice available is in ATI (Acronis
True Image). (i.e. there is no option shown to backup MBR and Track0,
explicitly. HOWEVER, when you open ATI and choose to restore the C: backup
image, ATI puts a dotted line box around the MBR and Track0 display line,
implying it will also restore those.

I want to avoid having to use fixmbr, etc (and the Recovery Console) here.

snip