Thanks a million buf, i found a snippet in the first guide that was useful:

One nice thing about Acronis True Image that sets it apart from competing products is that when you load it from the bootable Rescue CD, Acronis True Image loads completely into RAM. So if you only have a single optical drive installed, you can remove the Rescue CD to insert the discs containing your backups without having to worry about swapping the Rescue CD in and out during the restore process.
Looks like i'm good to go, one other thing i thought i'd mention, i was fiddling with hard drives earlier and i set my 200gb maxtor to slave to backup some bits onto my main drive and the system failed to boot, so i fiddled, and eventually i got it going only to see a S.M.A.R.T warning that the drive is about to fail so that's 2 in a week, so that is even more reason to get acronis sorted at the rate i'm going this primary drive will pack in anytime.


Liam