Making an Image Recovery Disk

[Kareeser]

Hi everybody,

I've recently formatted a friend's PC for him, and I decided to make a recovery disk (which would shorten the process if it ever needed to be repeated).

I used Acronis TI 8.0 to make a bootable disk, and then imaged the hard drive, and burned the image onto 5 (!) CDs.

The problem is that the CD's won't act like a recovery disk... in that I'd need to run the bootable CD first, then restore the image from the 5 CD's.

Kinda cumbersome, and not as nice as the Recovery CD's that Dell/HP/Compaq have. Is there a way to make those kinds of recovery disks?

[rjfvillarosa]

From what I have seen the Dell, HP, Compaq and other manufacturers recovery CD's actually access a hiiden partition on the harddrive and the reinstall setup is run from that partition, saying that a couple of days ago I fitted a new harddrive to a Toshiba laptop, the customer supplied the harddrive and so to be sure that I wasn't wasting my time I ran harddrive diagnostics on it and zero filled it.
The recovery CD was excellent, when it booted it said that it was starting Windows98, I assumed this was because it needed DOS support for what it wanted to do next, then it opened a DOS Window with a GUI giving you the choice to carryout some diagnostics or reinstall a ghost image of the original installation for the machine using Symantec Ghost.

[glc]

You need to make a DVD, not five CD's.

[Kareeser]

That's a possible solution... but another computer I formatted had the same procedure done (this one was a small hard drive, enough to be imaged onto one CD).

However, putting that CD into the drive still didn't make it automatically bootable...

[glc]

I don't think Acronis 8 can do exactly what you want - you have to boot with something that contains the restoration program first.

Version 9 apparently adds functionality:

New! DVD Burning — Save backups directly to DVDs without using 3rd party DVD burning software

Exclusive Acronis Recovery Manager — Boot your computer to start the recovery process without boot media by selecting the F11 key, even if your operating system has failed

[Kareeser]

Ah, that's what I was looking for.

Guess there are drawbacks to purchasing obsolete programs... it did cost less though

Thanks for your help.