Restoring a system image

"(PeteCresswell)" wrote:

Per Terry Pinnell:
Do others in fact actually saved images? Or just trust they'll work if
ever desperately needed? Any statistics to support such optimism?

I have been using something called ShadowProtect to image my systems for
at least five years. Probably wretched excess feature-wise, but at
the time I purchased it it was the only one I knew of that would let me
browse an image (to recover files I had mistakenly saved to C: instead
of a data drive).

For three years, I had a teenager pounding on the box a couple of hours
a day and it got to the point where if the system seemed the least bit
flaky I wouldn't even think twice: just kick off a CYA backup, get a cup
of coffee, start a restore, drink said coffee, and 20 minutes later have
a good system.

Never a problem... not once.

Two Key Concepts:

- System vs Data: Allocate a D: partition on your disc or install
a separate disc for Data. Data goes on "Data", never on C: (System)

- Assume you're going to mess up: Before restoring from a
known-to-be-good image, take that CYA backup image just in case
you forgot and left something critical on the Desktop.


Now I have Macrium for incremental Data backups - and it would serve
for System images too.... but I am used to/comfortable with
ShadowProtect.... and ShadowProtect runs about a hundred times faster
than Macrium (making those CYA backups simpler/more practical).

Thanks, I'll take a look at ShadowProtect - at the risk of giving me
yet another alternative option to evaluate!

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

wrote:

On Sat, 20 Aug 2016 21:35:58 +0200, "R.Wieser"
wrote:

Terry,

Can I then restart the PC, go into BIOS, specify H: as the
boot up drive, and proceed to run as normal for a while?

You could, but you could not be sure that the OS than keeps running from
your H: drive. It could, due to absolute paths in the registry, switch over
to the (origional) C: at any moment.
When you boot from a drive, it will be C: no matter where it resides.
I do it all the time when switching from my XOP drive to a DOS drive
or a W/98 drive. Of course DOS and W/98 won't see NTFS drives but I
have other drives (partitions) in the system and the other FAT drives
just start mapping D:, E: after whatever I booted from.

Thanks. That doesn't seem to rule it out then? Could you still access
the original C: drive (the SSD in my case)? Presumably it would be a
bit confusing, but you wouldn't need to stay in that environment for
long once you'd established it *did* boot up properly.

I'm still hoping to hear from someone with more practical experience
than me who has actually done it. Although I have yet to understand
why (see my reply to John a few minutes ago) I suspect there must be
some show-stopper, as I'd expect it to be a popular method.

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

[Default] On Sun, 21 Aug 2016 12:05:44 -0400, in
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general wrote:

On Sun, 21 Aug 2016 08:40:26 +0200, "R.Wieser"
wrote:

Terry,

I don't quite follow what you mean by "You could restore
it to another hard drive to test it." Restore what?

"Restore" as in what you did putting the C: backup to the usb H: drive.

And he suggests to use a real drive instead of an usb one, as booting from
an usb drive sometimes causes problems (the procecc starts with legacy usb
support by the bios, but at some time the os tries to install its own
drivers. A point where it often goes wrong)

The biggest issue I have seen is you need a different boot sector on a
thumb drive so you need to be able to change the boot sector after you
load the image.
I have gotten an XP system to run on a thumb drive but I was jumping
through hoops and I am still not sure I could do it again. W/98 and
DOS are easier because XCOPY works with the right options.

Sorry. I just started a new thread before I read this one. I thought
this one was only about the subject line.

Well, maybe my topic is a little different.

[Default] On Sat, 20 Aug 2016 16:44:39 -0400, in
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general wrote:

On Sat, 20 Aug 2016 21:35:58 +0200, "R.Wieser"
wrote:

Terry,

Can I then restart the PC, go into BIOS, specify H: as the
boot up drive, and proceed to run as normal for a while?

You could, but you could not be sure that the OS than keeps running from
your H: drive. It could, due to absolute paths in the registry, switch over
to the (origional) C: at any moment.
When you boot from a drive, it will be C: no matter where it resides.
I do it all the time when switching from my XOP drive to a DOS drive
or a W/98 drive. Of course DOS and W/98 won't see NTFS drives but I
have other drives (partitions) in the system and the other FAT drives
just start mapping D:, E: after whatever I booted from.

Aha.

I was going to reply to Rudy before I read your reply. And my post
is still in my head, that is, even if what Rudy said was true, from
Terry's pov, as long as his backup drive booted and ran a little bit,
isn't that enough to show that his image is good? Except for
what bother's me, that some files were not copyable during the imaging
and I wouldn't discover their absence until who knows how long after I
boot.

Or can I assume that all image programs are able to copy every file?
That bootability questions are only about the boot sector etc. that
are created rather than actually copied from the source?

[Default] On Sun, 21 Aug 2016 15:22:34 +0100, in
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Charlie+
writes:
On Sat, 20 Aug 2016 21:37:15 +0100, Terry Pinnell
wrote as underneath :
[]
Thanks Rudy, understood. Not as straightforward as I'd hoped!

Do others in fact actually saved images? Or just trust they'll work if
ever desperately needed? Any statistics to support such optimism?

When you first start using your choice of software Acronis, Macrium etc
etc, test it, restore images, see that they work in the equipment they
are meant for from zero as if you have had a genuine failure and you
then can be sure you know what you are doing when the failure day comes!
[]
That's what Terry wants to do: be sure that he can restore from the
image he's just created. Which is a good thing to want to be sure you
can do.

But, it does require a "spare" hard drive. If you try to restore the
image you've just created, to the drive you created it from, and for any
reason this _doesn't_ work, you've just hosed your working system.


For those not using a laptop and backing up to an HDD, would most of
these difficulties be eliminated by making the backup drive the second
harddrive in the PC? Then one could set up multi-boot, or better
yet, for testing, use a CD to change which drive has an active boot
partition. (I'm assuming the PC will boot from the secondary drive
if the primary has no active boot partition. ??)

(Terry: I'd image just your C: partition [and any hidden one]; that way
you don't need as big a spare drive to test the restore to. This is
assuming you have your main drive partitioned into a reasonably-small C:
partition and the rest as a data one [which doesn't need imaging, just
simple copying, to back it up].)

Terry Pinnell wrote:


Thanks John. So is that a clear cut No to my opening question please?

"So, does that include the external USB HD I described in my question
please? IOW, can I do exactly what I asked?"

If not, what is the underlying reason? If the image was a bit-by-bit
clone of my SSD C:, on an external USB WD HD, why could I not boot
from that?

I've seen ambiguous answers on this, but it's obviously a key issue.

I definitely do not want to physically replace my Samsung 950 Pro
V-Nand M.2 PCl—e SSD 256GB, with its critical cabling to my Asus Z170
Pro 4 Motherboard. To grossly mis-quote Hancock, "It might seem easy
to you, but it's life or death to some people!"

Doesn't that thing just unplug ?

It should be, like, remove one screw, slide the device
out of the socket. Done.

There is an Asrock with a name like that. Not sure about Asus.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/asro...abit-lan-usb-3

https://s4.postimg.org/dinoib8l9/NVM...video_card.jpg

OK, so I simulated leaving the internal disk in place
and cloning to the external, then trying to boot
Win10 14393 from the USB3 clone hard drive. The
result is:

"Inaccessible Boot Volume"

https://s3.postimg.org/6nsqks4yb/ina...oot_volume.jpg

I repeated the experiment, cloned over the internal
to the USB3 external hard drive. Removed the internal
drive. The OS will still not boot from the USB3
hard drive. I get the same inaccessible boot volume error.

Next, I tried removing the hard drive from the USB enclosure.
Put it inside the PC as a SATA drive (an ESATA connection would
work equally well, as long as the OS has a driver for the port).

In this case, cloning the OS drive to the empty drive, then
booting the new clone, works. The Disk Management shows
System,Active,Boot and as far as I can tell, is functional.
The lock screen picture is different, so the OS state
isn't entirely successfully preserved. But nothing
appears to be broken. (Since Macrium has edited some
disk identifiers on the clone, it's never an exact
match. If you clone exactly, one of the drives
will go "Offline".)

So if you want to verify your software and its cloning
capability, you're going to need something other than
USB3 for a connection for the hard drive. I got a good
result from SATA.

Paul

On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 11:47:14 -0400, Micky
wrote:

[Default] On Sat, 20 Aug 2016 16:44:39 -0400, in
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general wrote:

On Sat, 20 Aug 2016 21:35:58 +0200, "R.Wieser"
wrote:

Terry,

Can I then restart the PC, go into BIOS, specify H: as the
boot up drive, and proceed to run as normal for a while?

You could, but you could not be sure that the OS than keeps running from
your H: drive. It could, due to absolute paths in the registry, switch over
to the (origional) C: at any moment.
When you boot from a drive, it will be C: no matter where it resides.
I do it all the time when switching from my XOP drive to a DOS drive
or a W/98 drive. Of course DOS and W/98 won't see NTFS drives but I
have other drives (partitions) in the system and the other FAT drives
just start mapping D:, E: after whatever I booted from.

Aha.

I was going to reply to Rudy before I read your reply. And my post
is still in my head, that is, even if what Rudy said was true, from
Terry's pov, as long as his backup drive booted and ran a little bit,
isn't that enough to show that his image is good? Except for
what bother's me, that some files were not copyable during the imaging
and I wouldn't discover their absence until who knows how long after I
boot.

Or can I assume that all image programs are able to copy every file?
That bootability questions are only about the boot sector etc. that
are created rather than actually copied from the source?

I think the only files it will not image are the swap files and they
get reloaded when you boot anyway.
I use Acronis and it has worked perfectly every time. That is the best
way to recover from a virus or some horrible software loading debacle.
It is far better than system restore.
Just format your C: from a bootable CD and reload the image. If you
think it is a virus, format them all and restore from a safe backup.
If you are really worried, do a write all ones, partition, format and
reload.

Paul wrote:

Terry Pinnell wrote:


Thanks John. So is that a clear cut No to my opening question please?

"So, does that include the external USB HD I described in my question
please? IOW, can I do exactly what I asked?"

If not, what is the underlying reason? If the image was a bit-by-bit
clone of my SSD C:, on an external USB WD HD, why could I not boot
from that?

I've seen ambiguous answers on this, but it's obviously a key issue.

I definitely do not want to physically replace my Samsung 950 Pro
V-Nand M.2 PCl—e SSD 256GB, with its critical cabling to my Asus Z170
Pro 4 Motherboard. To grossly mis-quote Hancock, "It might seem easy
to you, but it's life or death to some people!"

Doesn't that thing just unplug ?

It should be, like, remove one screw, slide the device
out of the socket. Done.

OK, I've never tried it. But that method assumes I have a replacement!


There is an Asrock with a name like that. Not sure about Asus.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/asro...abit-lan-usb-3

https://s4.postimg.org/dinoib8l9/NVM...video_card.jpg

OK, so I simulated leaving the internal disk in place
and cloning to the external, then trying to boot
Win10 14393 from the USB3 clone hard drive. The
result is:

"Inaccessible Boot Volume"

https://s3.postimg.org/6nsqks4yb/ina...oot_volume.jpg

I repeated the experiment, cloned over the internal
to the USB3 external hard drive. Removed the internal
drive. The OS will still not boot from the USB3
hard drive. I get the same inaccessible boot volume error.

Next, I tried removing the hard drive from the USB enclosure.
Put it inside the PC as a SATA drive (an ESATA connection would
work equally well, as long as the OS has a driver for the port).

In this case, cloning the OS drive to the empty drive, then
booting the new clone, works. The Disk Management shows
System,Active,Boot and as far as I can tell, is functional.
The lock screen picture is different, so the OS state
isn't entirely successfully preserved. But nothing
appears to be broken. (Since Macrium has edited some
disk identifiers on the clone, it's never an exact
match. If you clone exactly, one of the drives
will go "Offline".)

So if you want to verify your software and its cloning
capability, you're going to need something other than
USB3 for a connection for the hard drive. I got a good
result from SATA.

Excellent stuff, much appreciate your taking the time and trouble. A
very disappointing conclusion though.


Paul

In message , Terry Pinnell
writes:
[]
Thanks John. So is that a clear cut No to my opening question please?

"So, does that include the external USB HD I described in my question
please? IOW, can I do exactly what I asked?"

I'm a bit confused what you're using this external USB HD for: storing
the image, or storing the - bootable - imaging/cloning software.

If not, what is the underlying reason? If the image was a bit-by-bit
clone of my SSD C:, on an external USB WD HD, why could I not boot
from that?

Some confusion between "image" and "clone" here.

Current usage seems to be:

Cloning: a bit-by-bit copy of one disc to another. (In the extreme, if
you clone a disc to a larger one, it will appear the same size as the
original drive.) Usually, you can boot from a cloned drive, if you
physically replace the original drive by the clone.

Imaging: making a *file* that contains the _contents_ of one or more
partitions (including hidden ones), from (I think) one or more drives.
In effect, it's not dissimilar to a .ZIP file. There's no way you can
boot from an image, even if you were to put the drive with the image
file on it in place of the original source drive. You need to run the
same software you used to create the image, to regenerate (unpack,
unzip) the image back to the original partition(s) on a drive - either
the original drive (e. g. if you've hosed your system, or had ransomware
or other malware), or a new drive (e. g. if your original drive has
died). Obviously, in order to be able to run this software, it has to be
bootable, on something that your system's BIOS can boot from. (I prefer
a mini-CD, as I know it's something fixed and unchangeable, but a USB
stick is fine if your system can boot from USB, which most can.)

So to _use_ an *image*, there are _three_ drives involved:
1. The - bootable - one with the (de-)imaging software on it;
2. the one where you put the image;
3. the one you're going to restore the image to.

(I guess you could put the image onto the same one you have the bootable
restore-image software on, but I wouldn't, for the risk of corrupting
the restore-image software.)

I've seen ambiguous answers on this, but it's obviously a key issue.

I definitely do not want to physically replace my Samsung 950 Pro
V-Nand M.2 PCl—e SSD 256GB, with its critical cabling to my Asus Z170
Pro 4 Motherboard. To grossly mis-quote Hancock, "It might seem easy
to you, but it's life or death to some people!"

In which case (I'm assuming the above is, or contains, your C: drive)
the only way you can be _sure_ your image can be restored will be to put
your heart in your mouth and restore it. Risking hosing your system
(because restoring an image _will_ overwrite what's there).

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

After all is said and done, usually more is said.

In message , Micky
writes:
[]
isn't that enough to show that his image is good? Except for
what bother's me, that some files were not copyable during the imaging
and I wouldn't discover their absence until who knows how long after I
boot.

Or can I assume that all image programs are able to copy every file?

If booted independently, they can copy most files. As that's the only
way I've ever used them, I can't be sure, but I think if run from inside
a running OS, there are files they can't.

That bootability questions are only about the boot sector etc. that
are created rather than actually copied from the source?
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

After all is said and done, usually more is said.

On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 23:40:55 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

If booted independently, they can copy most files. As that's the only
way I've ever used them, I can't be sure, but I think if run from inside
a running OS, there are files they can't.

My Acronis runs under XP and I have restored the images it creates
with no problems. I think it is only the swap files that will not copy
and the system rebuilds them on the fly when you boot.

wrote:
On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 23:40:55 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

If booted independently, they can copy most files. As that's the only
way I've ever used them, I can't be sure, but I think if run from inside
a running OS, there are files they can't.

My Acronis runs under XP and I have restored the images it creates
with no problems. I think it is only the swap files that will not copy
and the system rebuilds them on the fly when you boot.

Doesn't Acronis have a viewer-type application for
examining the contents of a backup ? Maybe with that
you can check to see if pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys
are present or are missing.

On Windows 7 images, I would check to see if
Windows.edb got captured. That's the database
for the Search Indexer (can be 1GB in size). Since the Indexer
starts building the index from scratch, after a restore
of C: , something is going on there that needs checking.
Maybe the file simply isn't written to the backup image ?

Paul

On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 20:11:57 -0400, Paul
wrote:

wrote:
On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 23:40:55 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

If booted independently, they can copy most files. As that's the only
way I've ever used them, I can't be sure, but I think if run from inside
a running OS, there are files they can't.

My Acronis runs under XP and I have restored the images it creates
with no problems. I think it is only the swap files that will not copy
and the system rebuilds them on the fly when you boot.

Doesn't Acronis have a viewer-type application for
examining the contents of a backup ? Maybe with that
you can check to see if pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys
are present or are missing.

On Windows 7 images, I would check to see if
Windows.edb got captured. That's the database
for the Search Indexer (can be 1GB in size). Since the Indexer
starts building the index from scratch, after a restore
of C: , something is going on there that needs checking.
Maybe the file simply isn't written to the backup image ?

Paul

I don't see a viewer. I know when I was doing XCOPY copies of my W/98
machines it whined about the swap file but the copies always booted
and ran. I just assumed it left a place holder and the file was
rebuilt on the boot. After all that is transactional data that is not
going to be the same every time the RAM fills up.

Paul wrote:
wrote:
On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 23:40:55 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

If booted independently, they can copy most files. As that's the only
way I've ever used them, I can't be sure, but I think if run from inside
a running OS, there are files they can't.

My Acronis runs under XP and I have restored the images it creates
with no problems. I think it is only the swap files that will not copy
and the system rebuilds them on the fly when you boot.

Doesn't Acronis have a viewer-type application for
examining the contents of a backup ? Maybe with that
you can check to see if pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys
are present or are missing.

On Windows 7 images, I would check to see if
Windows.edb got captured. That's the database
for the Search Indexer (can be 1GB in size). Since the Indexer
starts building the index from scratch, after a restore
of C: , something is going on there that needs checking.
Maybe the file simply isn't written to the backup image ?

Paul

You can use Windows Explorer to view the contents of an Acronis image backup
(tib) file, and that even allows you to selectively copy files from the
backup image to your drive, but I'm not sure if that's what you're asking.

If you're asking for a viewer explicitly in Acronis (and not using windows
explorer), I don't think so, but I might have missed it.

[Default] On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 01:48:05 +0100, in
microsoft.public.windowsxp.general "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Terry Pinnell
writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote:

In message , Charlie+
writes:
On Sat, 20 Aug 2016 21:37:15 +0100, Terry Pinnell
wrote as underneath :
[]
Thanks Rudy, understood. Not as straightforward as I'd hoped!

Do others in fact actually saved images? Or just trust they'll work if
ever desperately needed? Any statistics to support such optimism?

When you first start using your choice of software Acronis, Macrium etc
etc, test it, restore images, see that they work in the equipment they
are meant for from zero as if you have had a genuine failure and you
then can be sure you know what you are doing when the failure day comes!
[]
That's what Terry wants to do: be sure that he can restore from the
image he's just created. Which is a good thing to want to be sure you
can do.

But, it does require a "spare" hard drive. If you try to restore the
image you've just created, to the drive you created it from, and for any
reason this _doesn't_ work, you've just hosed your working system.

So, does that include the external USB HD I described in my question
please? IOW, can I do exactly what I asked? Have others done exactly
that, which seems an easy enough method, especially for a user (lime
me) who does not want to open the case on this newly purchased PC and
start playing with cables etc.

As you'll have gathered, I confess to some confusion after reading all
the replies ;-)


(Terry: I'd image just your C: partition [and any hidden one]; that way
you don't need as big a spare drive to test the restore to. This is
assuming you have your main drive partitioned into a reasonably-small C:
partition and the rest as a data one [which doesn't need imaging, just
simple copying, to back it up].)

The only way you can be _sure_ that the image you've created - whatever
you've created it on - is valid, is to "restore" it to *either* the
drive you made it from, *or* to another, blank, drive that you fit in
its place.

Can you eliminate one step if, instead of backing up the C drive, you
clone it. Then there is no need to restore, only to fit the cloned
drive in the place of the original drive.

Though you clone it, including bootability in the first place, can 't
you continue to update it as there are changes in the C drive, using
vcopy or Karen's Replicator or xcopy or xxcopy? That won't take away
its bootability, will it?

Clearly, I would be using compression, but hard drives are so big,
that seems like no problem.

(If, when you say "not want to open the case on this newly
purchased PC and start playing with cables etc.", you are referring to
a desktop machine, then in most cases it really isn't that difficult to
switch hard drives. [In fact, it isn't difficult on most laptops either
- in fact arguably simpler.])