Need software to create a image of hard disk which can be restored ..

A

ahmadka

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 11, 2006
Messages
136
Hey all .. Well I recently got a new netbook and I'd like to get some software which can create an image of my entire system, from which I can restore my system to its current condition even if I formatted it .. Basically, I need to create a recovery disc, which my netbook did NOT come with ..

I remember using a very old version of Norton Ghost which used to run at Boot time and dumped an image of the entire hard disk, which could then be restored ..

I would also prefer a software which allows me to create a USB based backed, since netbooks don't have DVD drives ..

I don't mind getting a commercial software too (that is, I don't want to be limited to only free software) ..

Any suggestions would be really appreciated :)
 
If your netbook has Windows 7 and you happen to have a USB DVD drive you can use the built in backup feature to create a system image, then use the built-in "Create a System Repair disc" utility.
 
Clonezilla...its free, and allows all sorts of backup options, via network is my preferred.
 
If you want to buy one, Acronis True Image seems to be the one everyone recommends. I have not used it myself, but I tried a few freeware backup programs and Comodo Backup seemed to be the best one.
 
Regarding Acronis, are you guys sure it allows me to make a bootable USB backup, from which I can recover ? .. I'm asking this because I tried Acronis once before and it wasnt able to make a bootable USB-based backup for some reason ..

Same question goes for Comodo Backup and Clonezilla.. I can't do a CD/DVD backup as netbooks don't have a CD/DVD Drive ..
 
I looked at both Acronis and Macrium last night, and was unable to carry out this task with both of them .. I spent like 4 hours with Acronis, and GOD that software made me angry .. !! There's an option 'Make the media bootable' in Acronis, and no matter which USB drive I inserted, this option is always disabled .. !!

With Macrium, you are required to buy the software before you can make a Windows PE Bootable USB Drive .. And I don't want to buy the software before evaluating this feature first ...

Any more suggestions ?
 
ahmadka said:
Regarding Acronis, are you guys sure it allows me to make a bootable USB backup, from which I can recover ? .. I'm asking this because I tried Acronis once before and it wasnt able to make a bootable USB-based backup for some reason
Click to expand...
Acronis is able to make a bootable disc, which is then able to read an image stored on a USB drive. Additionally, the "Startup Recovery Manager" can be turned on in their software to give a "Press F11 for startup recovery" message that does the same job as a bootable disc.
 
I'll make this short and sweet so please, read it carefully:

There is no piece of backup software out there on the market today, at this moment, that will make an image of your hard drive(s) and create a bootable optical media backup set for you automagically meaning that after the backup process is done, you end up with a disc or set of discs that you label like "Disk 1, Disk 2, etc" and when you want to restore the machine to that state from that image, you insert Disk 1 and boot off it, similar to how factory restore discs work on OEM machines.

That's it, in a nutshell. None of them, not True Image, not Ghost, not Clonezilla, not DriveImageXML, absolutely nothing out there will create a bootable recovery set with the actual backup software on the backup set itself.

That's the downside of the situation and I honestly to this day still can't figure out why only one piece of software in the past 20 years could do that: Powerquest Drive Image, which disappeared a long time ago when Symantec bought up Powerquest and destroyed that company's reputation completely.

Powerquest Drive Image was the only application that would: a) make a bit-for-bit image of your hard drive or individual partitions and b) copy itself to the first disc so you could use the backup set itself to restore the image without requiring the actual Drive Image CD around to do it.

Nobody else has ever done this, even to this day. I really can't figure out why Acronis hasn't done this yet either considering how popular their product is (and it's my imaging app of choice for over 6 years now). Ghost doesn't do it, never has, most likely never will (Ghost took a lot of what Drive Image offered from the acquisition of Powerquest but not that most important and valuable aspect of creating a bootable recovery SET). And no other imaging software does it either, which to me is an absolute oddity in this day and age.

What True Image means by the bootable recovery media is that it creates a CD - one single disc, aka a piece of media - that is bootable and has the DOS-based version of the True Image application on it - that's the disc you require when you want to restore an image to a machine. You boot off that CD then use the app to pull the original image file from another drive, partition, or network resource to be restored.

Hope this clarifies things somewhat... I really do wish True Image could do a proper bootable recovery set but it doesn't, and I can't for the life of me understand why.
 
Bahamut said:
What True Image means by the bootable recovery media is that it creates a CD - one single disc, aka a piece of media - that is bootable and has the DOS-based version of the True Image application on it - that's the disc you require when you want to restore an image to a machine. You boot off that CD then use the app to pull the original image file from another drive, partition, or network resource to be restored
Click to expand...
Acronis True Image Home's bootable media has a GUI for it. You can optionally tell it to load the Linux commandline, but it defaults to loading the GUI.

Acronis True Image Workstation and Enterprise are the same as well.
 
Ok, I didn't mean DOS-based like you think I meant. :)

It's not a Windows-based app running in a WinPE environment was what I was leaning towards; it might look exactly like the Windows based version of the same software, but it's not, that's what I meant to say or at the very least imply. By "DOS-based" I guess people take it as such, instead of GUI-based which the True Image recovery media provides.

Ain't no command line needed 'round these parts...
 
Bahamut said:
Ok, I didn't mean DOS-based like you think I meant. :)

It's not a Windows-based app running in a WinPE environment was what I was leaning towards; it might look exactly like the Windows based version of the same software, but it's not, that's what I meant to say or at the very least imply. By "DOS-based" I guess people take it as such, instead of GUI-based which the True Image recovery media provides.

Ain't no command line needed 'round these parts...
Click to expand...
Agreed, and that much was already understood. My point was that it command line was not the only option, and that the default was a GUI. Whether the GUI is Windows, Linux, Mac, XYZ, etc., is really out of scope for the thread... so long as whatever it is gets the job done ;)
 
I find it easier to do a network backup then restore from disks, it seems acronis home 11 works okay for this. I don't use USB much but was able to backup using it to an external drive, normally I use a cd boot disk to backup to the network, the usb boot drive had issues with access network shares, possibly easy to resolve but I don't use USB drive for this so I don't have the interest in diagnosing. I saw some articles for an all in one backup using newer versions of Acronis but I don't have this to test.
 
Acronis use to be great but I have had nothing but problems with it lately and am running the latest build for True Image Home 2011. This is not an isolated criticism ... their forum is populated with an ever increasing number of complaints centering on 3 issues (a) backup hangs (b) 'the specified file does not exist issue' which has been around forever, and (c) apparent valid backups that can't be verified.

I've run it both through Win7 and by bootable media, specifically with attempts to backup to a external hard drive via usb.

This use to be a great piece of software from a very responsive firm. These days with free competing software from Easeus and Paragon I honestly think Acronis's day is numbered if they don't solve these ongoing issues, many of which date back over a year.
 
Been using True Image practically since the first day the first version hit the market and I have to say, of the thousands upon thousands of times I've used it (and most of the uses being my own machines, as I'm a software tester on the side and I start over excessively) I've yet to have even one instance of not being able to a) make an image to any device, drive, or network location or b) restoring said image from said device, drive, or network location.

Sometimes I have to assume I must be the luckiest person on earth 'cause 99.9% of the problems that other people have with this app and hundreds if not thousands of others - including Windows itself - are simply issues I don't experience. Weird.
 
If you can find a USB stick that is large enough I suspect you could install clonezilla on it and then save your image on the same stick.

Clonezilla can also save and restore images over the network so you can use a small stick to boot and then push the image out to your fileserver.
 
arcturus said:
Acronis use to be great but I have had nothing but problems with it lately and am running the latest build for True Image Home 2011. This is not an isolated criticism ... their forum is populated with an ever increasing number of complaints centering on 3 issues (a) backup hangs (b) 'the specified file does not exist issue' which has been around forever, and (c) apparent valid backups that can't be verified.

I've run it both through Win7 and by bootable media, specifically with attempts to backup to a external hard drive via usb.

This use to be a great piece of software from a very responsive firm. These days with free competing software from Easeus and Paragon I honestly think Acronis's day is numbered if they don't solve these ongoing issues, many of which date back over a year.
Click to expand...

I have to agree with you here. I have been using True Image with two clients for the last few years. I've had issues with both. I would have issues of it not properly backing up based on the schedule (even though their computer is on 24/7), drive filling up and not deleting the older ones even though it is set to... basically have to resort to using Secure Zone. Lots of issues with Vista compatibility although it seems to be finally resolved with 2011. I always used the latest updates of it. It is just a cumbersome application which is overhyped IMO. This is one of the only apps I've had serious issues like this, which is simply unacceptable especially for back up software.

One thing I hate about 2011, it's a pain in the ass to make a one time full system back up to a external HDD. I have a client that rotates few external HDD's and puts them in a safety deposit box. It was much easier to do in the older version. :confused:
 
I have successfully made (and tested!) a boot CD for Comodo Backup using Bart PE. Bart PE uses a Windows GUI instead of a DOS GUI like Win PE. While Comodo doesn't supply a boot CD, you can make one with Bart PE and a WinXP SP2 or later install disc; I think you can make a Vista or Win7 boot disc but I didn't try that. Comodo discusses how to make the boot disc here:

http://help.comodo.com/topic-9-1-143-1473-Appendix-3-Creating-a-Rescue-Disk-with-WinPE---BartPE.html

and the link to download PE Builder (which builds the Bart PE disk) can be found here:

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

When you're setting up your backup plan, make sure your restore process works by testing it thoroughly.

Make sure you test that your Comodo boot disk works on every PC that you need to run it on, that Comodo Backup is on the boot disk and runs, and can see everything that it needs to see to perform a restore. Finally, have the Comodo on the boot disk perform verifies on the .cbu files that you back up to.

Edit: just to underscore the importance of testing all of your computers with the boot disk, my WinXP PC booted up fine with the Bart PE boot disk, but the Win7 64-bit PC blue screened; I eventually found out that I needed to switch from AHCI to IDE in that PC's BIOS settings.

Second Edit: and once I've done that, I'm having odd glitches with not being able to choose the disk to restore to (the Browse For Folder window is completely grey with no white area to choose folders). I think I will just make Win7 boot disks with instructions from here and here. There's a comment that "Windows 7 is best option because it supports most network cards and you can even restore a backup from internet." But I will have to try that tomorrow.
 
Last edited:
Today I made a Comodo Backup Win7 boot disk using Windows AIK for Windows 7. I barely understood what I was doing, but managed to figure out how to follow the walkthrough (which starts at "Creating a Windows 7 image with Windows PE").

Fair warning. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. The walkthrough is not perfect. If you can't follow my notes, look for backup software that supplies a rescue CD rather than this maleficient tatterdemalion excuse of a walkthrough. If the WinXP BartPE disk works for all your PCs, use that instead.

The first thing they didn't mention is that if you have UAC on, you need to set the Windows PE Tools Command Prompt shortcut in the Start menu to run as administrator by going to the properties of the shortcut. If you don't, you get an error about administrative in step 2. You could probably just turn off UAC temporarily if you don't understand that.

You need to type in exactly what the examples say, except what you need to change. When the example says to type:
copype.cmd x86 c:\winpe_x86
...that's what you do, if you're running AIK on a Win7 32bit system. But if you're running AIK on a Win7 64bit system, you need to change all instances of x86 to amd64 and all instances of winpe_x86 to winpe_amd64, because the Comodo Backup installer installs a 64bit version on Win7 64bit and a 32bit version on Win7 32bit, but won't install a 32bit version on Win7 64bit. If you copy over a 64bit version of Comodo Backup onto an x86 boot disk, it won't work. When the example says to type:
oscdimg -n -bc:\winpe_x86\etfsboot.com c:\winpe_x86\ISO c:\winpe_x86\winpe_x86.iso
...that's exactly what you do, and the lack of a space in the -bc:\ part is not a typo, that's what you do (except when you need to use amd64 instead of x86).

In step 3, look out if you're doing amd64 instead of x86. The example needs to change to:
dism /image:c:\winpe_amd64\mount /Add-Package /PackagePath:"c:\Program Files\Windows AIK\Tools\PETools\amd64\WinPE_FPs\winpe-hta.cab"
...note that the \PETools\x86\ part needs to change to \PETools\amd64\

I skipped step 4 entirely because it was optional and entirely beyond me. I had to do step 7 using the Windows GUI because the command gave an error (it's just copying a file to a folder and renaming the file).

Burn the resulting winpe_x86.iso or winpe_amd64.iso file using ImgBurn. The walkthrough also tells you how to set up a USB thumbdrive and that runs quite a bit faster.

The amd64 version works on my Win7 PC, without the show-stopping GUI glitches that the BartPE version experienced. Annoyingly, it's stuck on 800x600, while the Comodo Backup GUI is designed for a larger resolution, so you have to move the window around to see everything on it. You also have to change directories and run cbu.exe with the command prompt. If somebody could figure out how to build it to automatically go to 1024x768 and run X:\COMODO BackUp\cbu.exe, that would be acceptable.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top