Bye bye PQ-DI,bye bye Ghost(well,sort of)

**Ridgerunr** · October 14th, 2003, 04:25 PM

Here's the scenario: Windows XP-home installed.Sp1 and(most) all 'hotfixes'. Was playing some short video clips(which i had played before with no probs). In the middle of one, speakers began emitting loud,fast screeching beeps and WMP 8 froze tight. Mouse would still move, but no input. Then screen went to what looked like 640x480 res. Message came up that filled the whole screen saying windows encountered a bla-bla error and would need to re-start to recover with only an 'ok' button.(still screechin'). Mouse worked on the 'ok' button and XP re-booted. Got as far as the splash screen(with lil' green movin' buttons)for about 2 secs and rebooted itself into a never-never land boot loop.
Drive had been imaged to another partition(and CD-R's) just a' couple days before. Hauled out my DI floppies and 'tried' to restore image from other partition. DI went thru' it's paces and image restored? Not!! On boot, it went to the splash screen and once again, loopity looped. Ookay,,pulled the CD-R's out and tried from 'them'. No bad clusters and restore 'verified' according to DI. Cold booted and right back to the 'loopin''.

Shut down, re-started with XP CD in drive and did a 'restore'. Had to go thru' the whole business of entering key code. Finally got back to desk top and had to re-register by phone.(modem unplugged,of course and didn't trust internet connection anyway at this point).
Yes,,i did consider a boot sector problem and tried 'fixboot' etc.,,still looped. Restore worked for the most part,but had to re-install a' couple of drivers and,of course, Sp1 and all the 'hotfixes'.
Bottom line,,lost much respect for Power Quest products. On thinking about the whole ballyhoo, i remembered a program that Sarrkazztic had mentioned here on a thread. Acronis True Image it was. I remembered it being rather expensive for my blood,but Googled over to their site to take another look. Lo and behold, they had an offer for owners of Ghost on a promo for the price of us$9.95! They wanted you to enter the UPC bar code off your Ghost box to qualify. I had only an OEM disk,so no code. They said to email them if you didn't have a code. Did that. Within a couple minutes,i had an email with a code number. Bought the program online and they emailed a link to dn/load from. Dn/loaded and burnt to disk.
Tweaked XP to exactly as i had it before and burnt an image to disk(s). Checked what was on disks and it looked good. All this was done from Windows! No dos involved! And it gave the option of making recovery disks on floppy 'or'(bootable) CD-R. Said it would take 5 floppies. I chose bootable CD-R and crossed my fingers.

Worked like a charm! Thought,,ok,,lets give it a' try.
Booted with recovery CD and 'restored' the image i just made. It was picture perfect and so easy i felt guilty!

Only thing is, to use the promo version, you need Ghost installed first. Apparently just to verify you own it. And this version 'is' a 'full' version with no restrictions or limitations.

After this experience, my main backup program will be from now on the Acronis program...

**dougj** · October 14th, 2003, 04:58 PM

Ridge,

Interesting post. Thanks for the level of detail. I've been using Ghost and/or DriveImage for many, many years and never had a problem with either one, but I've wondered if they've been able to keep pace with the newer OS's. I wonder if you would have had the same problem had you done a restore to a totally clean drive rather than laying it on top of the corrupt partition. (I know, it shouldn't matter, the image should overwrite everything, but it would still be an interesting 'speriment). Can I ask what version of Ghost you were using?

**Ridgerunr** · October 14th, 2003, 05:35 PM

Dougj,,Yes, it 'was' an experiment. At the price, i decided to see if it would do as advertised. Acronis True Image has very good reviews from several sources that 'are' neutral and Sarr's suggestion,plus the low price offer kicked me into giving it a shot. Glad now i did.

My Ghost copy is 2002. Works ok on my Win98se box, but the NTFS probs kept me from using it on XP. I was looking for a copy of Nortons system works for cheap to pull Ghost 2003 from. But now, i won't even bother...

If the above 'hadn't' worked, i was ready to do a 'clean' install anyway. I keep irreplaceable files on other partitions and CD's anyway. It's the hassle of having to re-install from scratch that makes me look for the best backup/image prog i can find...

**NickC** · October 14th, 2003, 05:45 PM

Hi Ridgerunr. Timely post - I was just thinking of replacing my main HDD. Many manufacturers come with progs to transfer the contents from your old HD to their new one, but I wasn't sure if they worked as well as Ghost, et. al. Now, reading your post makes me wonder if Acronis would be better. Can you post a link to their home page and/or good places to buy the software?

**Ridgerunr** · October 14th, 2003, 05:58 PM

http://www.acronis.com/products/trueimage/

How can I prepare my Windows XP, NT or 2000 system for cloning or migrating the data to different hardware?

NickC,,check this answer out in their Q&A section.

Another feature i like is the fact they 'do' have many good answers to users questions. Not necessary to have to find another place such as 'Radified' to get answers...

**Train** · October 14th, 2003, 06:30 PM

I have used DI2002 to make my recovery cds. And it works just fine with NTFS for me. And i do let it verify the files it transfers.

**SuperSparks** · October 14th, 2003, 06:58 PM

I had a similar problem with Drive Image 5 - it let me down totally when I really needed it. Ever since I've used Ghost and it's never let me down once. Version 2003 is the best yet, you can set everything in Windows and it just boots to DOS to actually create the image.

I must say, though, that nobody has had anything bad to say about Acronis yet if I wasn't so pleased with Ghost I'd certainly think about giving it a try.

**bchzd1** · October 14th, 2003, 07:04 PM

Booted with recovery CD and 'restored' the image i just made. It was picture perfect and so easy i felt guilty!

No joke. Had to try it myself. Goodbye PQ and Ghost

**Ridgerunr** · October 14th, 2003, 07:18 PM

Train,,i wasn't referring to DI about NTFS, it was Ghost 2002's not being compatible with it.

I just did another image to another drive/partition of C: with it. After doing such,you can open True Image and tell it to mount a virtual drive to access/explore your image. I mounted the drive "O" and it opened with a doubleclick and gave me access to all folders with no problems. To 'unmount' the drive,you just right click it and click 'unplug' and it's gone.

They don't have it setup to explore images on CD-R's yet, but they say it's coming soon. And updates(according to their site info) are free for registered owners(which i did). They send an email to notify you of updates available. The more i 'explore' this lil' program,the more i like it! And,,the install is just over 11MB's in size. Unlike the bloated DI 2002...

**Train** · October 14th, 2003, 07:24 PM

But does it accomodate using Boot disks?

Cloning, imaging and that I prefer to do it from DOS. As I work at times on Propietary computers and with them you can run into the virtual floppy problems.

You are right, Ghost 2003 is the first to work with NTFS.

**Ridgerunr** · October 14th, 2003, 07:35 PM

Train,,have a read in their FAQ section. This is what they say concerning your question:

What devices can be used to restore a system partition if I'm running Acronis True Image 6.0 from a bootable diskette or CD-R(W)?
Acronis True Image 6.0 recognizes all hard disks connected to the PC, along with a wide variety of removable media drives with IDE, SCSI, USB and PCMCIA interfaces including: CD-ROM / DVD-ROM and CD-R(W)recorders and burners, magneto-optical drives, Zip and Jaz devices, and many others.

The bootable CD-R it created for me has files to do whatever you want in either Windoze or various other OS's including several Linux distros...

**buf** · October 14th, 2003, 10:10 PM

Ridgerunr, I bought this for the $9.99 last November and am just now beginning to try it--in fact just this past Saturday. For $10, how can anyone go wrong IF they have Ghost installed at the time TrueImage is installed. It is perfectly fine with Acronis if you remove Ghost from your system AFTER TrueImage in installed. (Wonder why they encourage the removal of Ghost!!) TI won't work otherwise. I should know, I removed Ghost from my PC BEFORE trying to install TrueImage back last November. About 2 weeks ago I emailed 'em of what I had done accidentally. Told 'em I didn't want to have to reinstall Ghost and asked what they could do for me. Well, they sent me a code whereby it allowed me to install it!! I have burned my CDs and have the backup but I have not yet found the easy way to "prove" the CDs are good. I'll keep trying. Glad to know you are happy with TI AND your WindowsXP.
Oh yeah, I also burned the recovery bootup to a CD and so it is bootable and I burned a CD of something Acronis calls "Main Volume" and this CD goes in first when restoring.

**Ridgerunr** · October 14th, 2003, 11:30 PM

Hi buf,,I installed Ghost as instructed,but straight away used Reg Cleaner to remove all the 'Symantec' junk that gets installed with it. TI works just fine with this config. Don't know why you have to use 2 boot CD's unless they've changed it recently. I just made the one bootable CD and the 'recovery' i did went straightaway after i booted from it with nothing but the image disks asked for.

Think i'll just leave Ghost installed,without the other junk it doesn't take up much space and TI doesn't seem to care...

**NickC** · October 15th, 2003, 09:38 AM

Originally posted by Ridgerunr
http://www.acronis.com/products/trueimage/

How can I prepare my Windows XP, NT or 2000 system for cloning or migrating the data to different hardware?

NickC,,check this answer out in their Q&A section.

Another feature i like is the fact they 'do' have many good answers to users questions. Not necessary to have to find another place such as 'Radified' to get answers...

Thanks!

**buf** · October 15th, 2003, 05:30 PM

RR, I am happy that you are happy with TI. I went to their site this PM and installed an 11MB update!! I then tried to burn my C: drive, got the CDs burned without incident but then could not prove them by going to EXPLORE in TI. Don't know what I am doing wrong but at the "assigned drive"(I is the default in my case) AND I also get the message that the disk in the cdrom is NOT the MAIN VOLUME--the last CD used in the burn. Anyhoose, I finally get past that but then I get an error message: Cannot assign a drive letter to a partition from the image archive.
Like I say, I don't know what I am doing wrong but apparently TI is another piece of software that I--or my machine--can't work with.

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