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Acronis expert please help


Randy Myers

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Ok, I purchased Acronis True Image 2010, their latest. It works well however I have never used it before.

 

I created a backup image of my SSD drive (boot drive) saved on my external WD MyBook drive.

 

When I go to restore it always wants to do a sector by sector restore, therefore making any kind of flush of the drive moot.

 

What am I doing wrong. Is there some settings or procedure to have it only restore the used portion of the drive and not also over write all unused portions.

 

Any assistance would be greatly appreciate...

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Hi Randy,

 

when you made your image,you likely checked off the "Restore by sector" box during the "Back up" wizard. Make another image and this time do not check that option.Also,make sure you download the multi-parameter boot disk image from Acronis..works better than the one you create from the program itself.

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I think you are correct. I just created another image with the sector-sector unchecked.

 

The boot disk that the program created seems to work nice. You are saying they have a better version available for download? Any chance of posting a link?

 

Does anyone know for sure (not I think, but yes this is how it works), if erasing/resetting the drive writes it with all zeros or all ones? I know there is an option in Acronis Disk Cleanser to write drive one pass with zeros, if I do a custom and tell it FF in the box, does this write it all ones?

 

Is this a way of resetting the drive. I really want to get this all to work and there seems to be so much misinformation, half information and pure speculation out there. Can someone please answer this decisively and correctly.

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Ok, I purchased Acronis True Image 2010, their latest. It works well however I have never used it before.

 

I created a backup image of my SSD drive (boot drive) saved on my external WD MyBook drive.

 

When I go to restore it always wants to do a sector by sector restore, therefore making any kind of flush of the drive moot.

 

What am I doing wrong. Is there some settings or procedure to have it only restore the used portion of the drive and not also over write all unused portions.

 

Any assistance would be greatly appreciate...

 

Randy,

This is why I told you in the other thread you started about Acronis to not use sector backups.

 

FF = 11111111 (all one's)

 

As for is this a way to reset the drive, I don't know of anyone in these forums who have tried it. You may be the first. You should keep track of your drive speed benchmarks and when you get a slow drive, then try the Drive Cleanser with FF. Actually since you are still experimenting with that SSD of yours, you could write random data to the SSD, benchmark it, write FF to the drive, benchmark it again. If the results are night and day then I think you have your answer. You don't need to install an OS on it, do it as a secondary drive if you like (backup your primary hardrive as a precaution).

 

If you do test it out, love to know how it goes.

-Joe

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Yes, I believe that will write a binary 11111111 (Hex FF) which is what I understand the SSD needs to clear it. What I'm not certain of quite yet is if there is some other bit that needs to be changed. People using BCWipe didn't have any real change. Although using Drive Cleanser you are doing the entire disk which may be the key.

 

-Joe

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I am hoping some one is around that can respond right away :)

 

I downloaded the iso (don't see much of a difference from the boot disk made earlier, but not an issue), and I am currently re-writung the drive with FF.

 

I experimented with the boot disk prior to wiping the disk. The backup was made with the sector by sector option umchecked, however it appeared as if it still wanted to restore in sector by sector. Is there an option in the restore menus that I am missing?

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did you get it restored, Randy? There's no choice of "sector restore" - you tell it to restore the partition, and the MBR and track 0, and it recreates the disk. If you made the BACKUP in sector by sector mode, that's how it restores. If you made a 'normal' backup, it backs up the data having regard to the file system in use, and will recreate the disk folder by folder, file by file. When it is finished, all the segments of each file will be stored adjacent to each other, and all the free space will be together at the back of the partition. A perfect defrag, in fact.

 

I suspect the 'restore a file' choice is not available for a sector by sector backup - but I've never actually done one, so can't be sure.

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I don't know if this helps, however here is a quick screen shot just before proceeding. Same as before and when I clicked proceed it says recoverying sector by sector. The only difference is I run this from the boot disk after doing a complete fill of 1's... This backup was made without the sector by sector checked. I even created another backup to make 100% sure of this.
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Something isn't right. I'll scratch up a spare disk drive and do some experiments. Not today, unfortunately. But your screenshot prompts these questions: How did you get the screenshot if booting from a CDROM? If you secure-erased the disk, why did it leave the partition behind?

 

My timezone is UST+13 (NZ), it is 08:33 Tuesday, and I will do a full backup/wipe/restore test by Thursday 17:00, all being well, unless you get it solved in the meantime.

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I worked through the same steps on the installed version to that point to get the screen shot. I then cancelled instead of proceeding.

 

I did not secure erase the disk because the HDDErase utility does not seem to work for me. I used Acronis Drive Cleanser and cleaned the drive with FF as per our earlier conversation. Rebooted to the Acronis boot disk to restore and followed the same restore steps that led to the screen shot above. (found my backup and picked the steps that appeared logical).

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Randy,

You need to double check the backup you are restoring was accomplished with sector by sector unchecked. Whenever you do a wipe of the drive and then restore sector by sector, you are defeating the purpose of the wipe because all the data is written, including the empty places and creates an identical copy of the drive as it was during the backup. How about creating the backup by booting off your Acronis disk and selecting backup.

 

-Joe

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Randy,

I noticed from your image you still have the 100Mb partition created by W7 during install.Why do you keep this? I don't know for sure but I suspect the sector by sector recovery is happening because Acronis can't just slap your image on the drive as it has to preserve that little partition.You can get rid of it with the disk utility available on the Acronis boot disk.

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That little partition is required to align the real partition on the appropriate boundary. You could remove it, but performance would suffer.

 

It doesn't make ant difference whether you create the backup from boot disk or win7.

 

I susect the problem is you have not ticked both partitions when doing your original backup. i am testing that premise now, but can't finish before having to leave for the day. I will have definitive answers later tonight, and will post, good or bad.

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30 seconds before I have to go out. I have reproduced your situation. Have never before done a disk wipe. I haven't got to the bottom of how to fix it yet, but I suspect you will have to re-create the partitions (using quick format) before doing the restore. I guess Acronis thinks it is quicker to do a sector by sector restore than a format and file by file restore, when targetting a blank disk as in this situation.

 

To do the format you would use diskpart, found on the win7 install disk.

 

I will verify this, and do step-by-step instructions tonight or tomorrow. There are instructions hanginig around the web, if you are impatient. Basically, run the win7 install disk, choose repair tools, command line. type diskpart - wait for the prompt, type help and work from there.

 

Later.

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„Sector by sector“ is probably new problem with Acronis 2010 and maybe W 7. I did not meet any such troubles with Acronis 11 - which I used very frequently, and XP. I thoroughly read Help of Acronis 2010 and did not find any solution. Conterary to Backup Help chapter which mentions „sector by sector“, Restore chapter does not mention it. You are absolutely right that unchecking „sector by sector“ during backup does not clear unclickable announcement during restore.

There can be two explanations: bug in A 2010 (but then all is possible) or a bit simple one - when you back up NOT „sector by sector“ then by restoring „sector by sector“ you can restore only backuped sectors, and thus only parts of disk which were written on!?!

With Acronis 11 I have tested restore with iso boot disk, my disk made by Acronis program and restore from hard disk and did not find any differences.

There is, of course, another way out - Acronis support. But by my experience even if Acronis progs are high end Acronis support is from time to time lazy middle...

As far as Acronis DriveCleanser - maybe you will find explanation in chapters of Help concerning choice of cleaning methods. 2010 offers several specified options, but this is too far field for me...

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I'm between appointments, so thought I would report progress. I have experienced the refusal by Acronis to do other than a sector by sector restore - even after creating partitions for it. However, I have also successfully done a 'normal' restore sing the SAME archive and disk drive, so I know it will be possible for you. It must be a trick of operating. I will go back over it all to _prove_ this, but at the moment my conjecture is that you can't SELECTIVELY restore from the backup, you have to restore the whole disk. I mean, from memory (I'm sitting in my car just now, so can't get at my notes), if you check the top 'disk' checkbox in the "what to restore" panel, it works as desired, but if you just check the partition you are concerned with, but not the top box, it does a sector restore.

 

However, the great news is that, when we can get past the operating problem reliably, it really does do what we want. Using the Acronis disk cleaner with a custom x'ff' pass does write all ones on the disk, and using the disk examination tool you can see that AFTER the restore of the backed-up data, the x'ff' sectors still remain at the end of the disk.

 

I don't know if that disk examination tool could be used to determine if a disk actually NEEDS wiping. I will have a look at the sectors on my X256 (which has been abused, but never 'wiped'), and my wife's P256, which has only had a firmware upgrade, win7 install, and very light usage since new a few days ago.

 

Playing with a 10GB old maxtor disk, the backup, wipe, restore sequence took a total of about 20 minutes elapsed. Of course that was punctuated by lots of false starts and retries.

 

Tonight I will try to pull all this together into a coherent set of instructions.

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