Acronis True Image

[Kurai]

My girlfriend's computer is acting up again and while I thought that we had resolved all the problems and finally got it stable. The Hard Drive with the Operating System (Win XP SP3) installed on it decided to fail last night, and give a Reboot and select proper boot device error like the one here

Seeing as how I'm tired of having to constantly reinstall her computer, I decided to look into a method of reimaging her computer, Ghost 11 had previously failed me as it didn't allow me to backup her partitions.

Anyways I ended up going to Acronis True image and managed to backup the hard drive. I'm wondering if anyone is familiar with the product and know if the following scenario would work.

Plug in a backup hard drive onto an entirely different computer (mine) and use Acronis to restore the saved acronis image file to said hard drive, then replace the one on the GF's computer with it.

The Drive lettering has changed and instead of C:\ it's now L:\ and I'm not sure if that has any significant impact. Would this work or would I be better off just installing Windows fresh onto this new hard drive, install Acronis and restore the image over top of it?

Thanks for going through my wall of text ._.;

Also I believe the hard drive that's failed in the first place has some bad sectors and the MBR might be nuked, would something like Hiren's Boot CD recover that?

[Cephius]

Yes, that scenario should work. You can restore the image to any hard drive that has enough space to hold it. Drive letters shouldn't matter as long as Acronis builds the master boot record correctly and assigns the right partition as bootable.

[Purrrfect]

You should be able to restore the image to a hd on your pc, and it should ask you what drive letter you want to assign (but I believe that is relative to your system, so wouldn't really do much). I would just hold the image, install windows cleanly on the new hd and set a backup partition on it to put backups on and the image you have. Then, if there are files she needs you can just plug the image and access them then. Acronis is right handy stuff, so glad I found out about it at my last job... use it all the time.

[Kurai]

I actually planned ahead a little and her computer has 2 hard drives, the second one is partitioned to serve as her backups drive. As far as I'm aware, that's unaffected.

Hopefully this works when I go to her place to fix it after work.

Thanks for the help guys.

[Mafai]

My girlfriend's computer is acting up again and while I thought that we had resolved all the problems and finally got it stable. The Hard Drive with the Operating System (Win XP SP3) installed on it decided to fail last night, and give a Reboot and select proper boot device error like the one here

Seeing as how I'm tired of having to constantly reinstall her computer, I decided to look into a method of reimaging her computer, Ghost 11 had previously failed me as it didn't allow me to backup her partitions.

Anyways I ended up going to Acronis True image and managed to backup the hard drive. I'm wondering if anyone is familiar with the product and know if the following scenario would work.

Plug in a backup hard drive onto an entirely different computer (mine) and use Acronis to restore the saved acronis image file to said hard drive, then replace the one on the GF's computer with it.

The Drive lettering has changed and instead of C:\ it's now L:\ and I'm not sure if that has any significant impact. Would this work or would I be better off just installing Windows fresh onto this new hard drive, install Acronis and restore the image over top of it?

Thanks for going through my wall of text ._.;

Also I believe the hard drive that's failed in the first place has some bad sectors and the MBR might be nuked, would something like Hiren's Boot CD recover that?

I actually had this error a couple weeks back. I unplugged and reconnected my HDD (both cables) and it ended up working perfectly again. When this happened, I assumed the drive was dying and got another drive just incase, but I have not had any issues since (besides 1 blue screen)

[Kurai]

I actually had this error a couple weeks back. I unplugged and reconnected my HDD (both cables) and it ended up working perfectly again. When this happened, I assumed the drive was dying and got another drive just incase, but I have not had any issues since (besides 1 blue screen)

We keep getting this error intermittently, I haven't the slightest clue as to why it would pop up to begin with, as the computer she's currently on is rebuilt entirely from scratch with entirely new/different components from the original machine. Then again maybe it's something inherent with the Hard Drive and it just hates a certain component. I just wish it would work ; ;

[Kurai]

I tried most if not all the things in this thread. Unplugging and reconnecting the cables for the hdd, managed to get me as far as booting into Safe Mode, which subsequently crashed and would instead force a restart everytime it was about to load the Operating System.

I decided to then try and run Hiren's boot cd and see if I could get anything working that way. HDD Regeneration seemed promising, but it identified hundreds of thousands of bad sectors, and the drive being 500 GB, I suspect it's a lost cause and would take weeks at the rate it was going.

In defeat, I took the spare drive I had restored on my home pc and swapped it in with the bad drive. Worked like a charm and booted straight into Windows as if nothing had happened. Though it was a few months behind, I immediately updated Playonline/FFXI on it, ran updates for all noteworthy software like AVG antivirus and what not. Set aside an Acronis True Image Restore zone or whatever it's called, and also made an image stored on the second hard drive using Ghost 11 as an extra means of backup.

So while the machine is up and running, there's still the issue of seeing if I can recover files from the bad one. I tried plugging it into my own computer, but even though it ran a chkdsk upon boot up, it won't let me boot my computer, I'm currently letting it run HDD Regenerator in hopes of repairing the bad sectors, but I'm not holding my breath.

Any idea why my computer isn't booting up? It's probably something simple I forgot to do.

[Purrrfect]

Try putting the bad drive in an external enclosure?