Acronis Question

mtrox

Client called me yesterday with 0x00000077: KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR
BSOD. I had him run Dell Diagnostics and the drive failed, though it does reboot and work.....for now. He's got 2 years left on his Dell coverage so I see a new hard drive in his near future.

I'm sure Dell will expect him to rebuild from bare metal. He'll pay me to do that but has little patience for all the adjusting, tweaking stuff you do for a few months. I have a registered copy of Acronis Home 9.0. So...

1. Why couldn't I just put it on his sick hard drive, take an image, then slap that back on the new hard drive?
2. Is the recovery CD I made specific to my computer and drivers? Should I make a new one on his before we swap for the new HD?
3. I know there's no activation kind of stuff with Acronis, but will I run into any problems using it on another computer for about 2 hours?
4. Given the failure of his diagnostics, is there a chance I'm taking an image of a drive with some corrupted data? He has done an error check also.

Thrax

1. You can; see 4.
2. Specific to your PC.
3. Consult the EULA; I would probably say it's a per-seat license.
4. Yes, there is a chance.

mtrox

Thanks Thrax. Number 4 scares me. This guy does a lot of business out of his little laptop.

Missileman

If it's an NTFS file system and it passes checkdisk without errors or it fixes the errors then chance of corruption is very minimal. NTFS is a very robust file system with good redundancy as long as the metadata remains intact.

If it's FAT32/16 I'd worry too.

mtrox

It's NTFS Missleman. Anyone else? Am I worrying for no reason since it's NTFS and file check is OK?

Leonardo

For the sake of discussion, let's say that yes, his current HDD is physically bad and that yes, an Acronis cloning of the bad drive would also clone existing files corruption. I think you'd have a better than 50/50 chance of repairing the corruption on a new, cloned disk. Check Disk on NTFS works very well. With FAT it was always a crap shoot.

Another option would be to use Acronis, but not the clone option. You could use the "My Computer" backup, which would backup just about everything except boot sector files. Make your backup to a third, spare drive. You could then use whatever Windows installation would work just well enough to get his computer booted with the new hard drive. Once booted with the new drive, install Acronis and perform an Acronis Recovery operation using the data/files from the spare drive. I've done that before. It's not as fast as merely popping in a new, cloned drive, but I think there might less of a possibility of copying corrupted files onto the new hard drive.

mtrox

Leonardo wrote:

I think you'd have a better than 50/50 chance of repairing the corruption on a new, cloned disk.

Given this guy's attitude toward computers (more like "against" actually), I don't think 50/50 is good enough. He'll be out of town this weekend and call me 5 times for every little glitch.

He's got next day, on-site Dell coverage. I'll let them do whatever they do, then install all his files all over again. Luckily, he's pretty diligent about the backup program I set up for him.

Leonardo wrote:

Another option would be to use Acronis, but not the clone option. You could use the "My Computer" backup, which would backup just about everything except boot sector files. Make your backup to a third, spare drive. You could then use whatever Windows installation would work just well enough to get his computer booted with the new hard drive.

I've never tried that but it makes sense....except he just called and the HD is dying fast. Two more BSOD's last night, different errors...one mentioned ATAPI (again I haven't seen it yet) and it took him an hour to do one last backup that usually takes 10 - 15 minutes. At this rate, by the time he calls Dell and gets a HD on the way, there won't be enough left for me to do any Acronis stuff.

Thanks for the input guys.

Leonardo

If his hard drive is indeed failing as fast at it appears, then you should definitely go with the clone operation. The My Computer backup option runs in Windows and is much more demanding on the drive than the clone, which executes after restart before the machine is fully booted into Windows.

mtrox

I've never used Clone. I looked at it, that might be the ticket....if the thing is running at all by the time I get there. So on a lappy, could I just use a USB-IDE bridge for the second, unpartitioned disk? Would Acronis detect that at boot up? I've heard Acronis is a little quirky when it comes to USB drives.

maxwelltf

Leonardo wrote:

For the sake of discussion, let's say that yes, his current HDD is physically bad and that yes, an Acronis cloning of the bad drive would also clone existing files corruption. I think you'd have a better than 50/50 chance of repairing the corruption on a new, cloned disk. Check Disk on NTFS works very well. With FAT it was always a crap shoot.

Another option would be to use Acronis, but not the clone option. You could use the "My Computer" backup, which would backup just about everything except boot sector files. Make your backup to a third, spare drive. You could then use whatever Windows installation would work just well enough to get his computer booted with the new hard drive. Once booted with the new drive, install Acronis and perform an Acronis Recovery operation using the data/files from the spare drive. I've done that before. It's not as fast as merely popping in a new, cloned drive, but I think there might less of a possibility of copying corrupted files onto the new hard drive.

If I may join this thread.... you may be describing a solution for me as well. I have Acronis True Image Home 10.0 and made an image of an existing 30GB laptop drive, then installed a newer bigger 60GB drive in the laptop, ran Acronis from a bootable CD and restored "specified file and folders" to the new drive (if I restores "disks or partitions" I end up with a 30gb partition on the 60gb drive - and I don't want that - this laptop needs to have just one large 60gb partition). After restoring the "specified files and folders" to the 60gb drive, when it boots, it comes up with "NTLDR is missing". I suppose this is because the new 60GB drive does not have a proper MBR or something like that - or perhaps it's because all the restored files on the new 60gb drive are all 1 extra folder deep - they are installed in a folder called "Drive (C: )" rather that at the root level of the drive. Is there a way to correct this or add proper MBR files to the new drive so it will boot and my work will be finished?

Snarkasm

You can always get into a rescue mode or repair mode or whatever and just run a fixmbr or fixboot to replace the MBR, I think. You shouldn't have to use Acronis for that, if my memory serves me correctly.

maxwelltf

what does fixmbr or fixboot do? and where do I get those tools from?

Snarkasm

Both of them do exactly what they sound like; fixmbr is a tool to return your MBR to the original state, and fixboot writes a whole new boot sector to the disk. You might want to use fixboot if you think nothing transferred over. Both tools are on your OS disk.

WinXP’s Recovery Console has two utilities you can use to try to repair your boot sector: FIXBOOT or FIXMBR. FIXBOOT writes an entirely new boot sector, while FIXMBR repairs the MBR (master boot record) in the boot sector.

To run the Recovery Console, boot into your WinXP setup CD and press r when prompted. To boot into your WinXP installation CD, restart the computer and enter your Setup (BIOS [Basic Input/Output System]) program. Your BIOS should have a menu where you can change the sequence of boot devices for your computer. By default, your computer looks for a bootable disk in your floppy drive first, your hard drive second, and your CD drive last. Adjust the boot sequence in your BIOS so your computer searches for a bootable disc in your CD drive first (leave the hard drive as the second choice), insert your WinXP installation disc into your CD drive, and restart the computer. Because BIOS programs vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, consult your BIOS’ documentation to find out how to change the boot device sequence.

To run FIXBOOT, type FIXBOOT [drive] at the command prompt, where drive is the drive letter for your boot drive (usually C:). To run FIXMBR, type FIXMBR [device name], where device name is the nomenclature the Recovery Console’s MAP command uses to describe the various hardware devices in your computer. For example, you might type FIXMBR\device\HardDisk0 to restore your boot record’s MBR. If you don’t enter a device name, FIXMBR repairs the MBR of the default system disk.