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Restoring Acronis image of OS

Muse

Muse

Lifer
My Win7 32bit Home Premium laptop seems hosed. It had been acting strangely (several times a day it would suddenly and without warning have a spinning cursor for a minute, sometimes more, which would ultimately resolve).

Today, I allowed Windows Update to install 11 important and 2 optional updates, followed instructions to restart and the machine would not restart. I allowed Windows to attempt to repair itself and it reported that this had failed and I was allowed to attempt to restore from a restore point. I chose the oldest available of around 7 (April 3) and Windows reported that it could not start from that restore point. Seems Windows is hosed.

I installed the OS on Mar. 25, 2014, have an Acronis True Image Western Digital edition image from ~ a week later, Mar. 31, 2014. I have a couple of other images with the same file name (the original: My_partitions_full_b1_s1_v1.tib). All three backups have that same name. I failed to make notes of what machine those last 2 images were made of, which are from May 16, 2014 and March. 5, 2015. They could have been the problem machine. I'm a lot more confident in the 2nd than the 3rd in terms of it having been made from that machine. Can I find out? In any case, how do I restore from one of these? They are on large external USB HDs. I have a 2.5" HD enclosure, I can put the problem laptop's HD in that enclosure, attach it to one of my other machines and run Acronis on that machine. Can I restore to the HD that way? Actually, it's not a HD, it's an SSD, but that shouldn't be a problem, right? Can I make sure that the image being restored from was made from the problem machine? I just need to know what the name of the machine was that the image was made from. Thanks for help!
 
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Whoa! The laptop booted! It had failed to restore to the oldest offered restore point, Apr. 3. I then tried to restore from the next to last restore point, Apr. 7, thinking "how could this possibly work if the older one doesn't." However, after appearing to likewise fail, I came back to the machine, clicked a button and the machine succeeded in restoring to the Apr. 7 restore point (I'm on it right now). I have no reason to believe that Windows Updates will succeed, though, at this point. 😕
 
IIRC, you can 'mount' the images themselves, and look at them that way as well.
When you backup with Acronis, do you turn on verify? Stupidly, it is off by default.
 
I probably did not enable verify. I can check now, I guess, because the machine finally booted, however I have little confidence that I won't want to restore from one of those backups within the next week or two.

I presume that verify does a bit by bit comparison of the image with what was imaged just after the image was made, similar to copy software like Nero, etc.

At the moment, I'm using the HD with the images for another purpose. I'll have a chance to mount the images by tomorrow morning.
 
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Actually, no, their "verify" option only makes sure the structure of the image made is sane.
It doesn't actually compare what has been written to the original source.

What you could do is, run a md5 (or sha256 or...) checksum on the files in the image that is mounted, and then compare them to what you have now, and see if there is any difference.
You can use something like http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/hash_my_files.html or many other ones.
 
Acronis was great back then when MBR disks were the most used but when GPT disks began showing up on new systems and especially UEFI systems, I was able to backup the GPT partition just fine after buying the additional add-on which allows GPT disks but never succeeded with restoration. always starts and never succeeds. Since then I switched to Macrium Reflect Pro (now called the Home Edition after recently being upgraded to v6) which supports everything under the sun no problem, MBR, GPT, RAID, you name it. Never failed me once.


You can also use the free version of Macrium Reflect which has the same functionality of the paid version but the only difference between paid and free is with the free version, you can create a backup while in Windows just fine, but to restore the backup, you have to create a Macrium Reflect Resecue disk to boot up from it and initiate the restoration. The paid version allows you to add a startup entry to your boot options so when you do want to restore, the system will automatically restart into the rescure environment and start the restoration. Otherwise they're both the same, effective with no bloat like Acronis has now become, cloud storage and backup and so many extra services that come installed with Acronis.

Another thing I don't like about Acronis is it's like a yearly subscription, every year you have to buy a new version or upgrade if you want to benefit from the latest features but with Macrium Reflect you get a free upgrade for 1 year and they don't usually upgrade the main program version often.
 
I've been using AOMEI Backuper. I clone the netbook that hosts a Teamspeak server and FTP server and monitors the phone line with caller ID data to shield against telemarketers.

Use AOMEI for the laptop and desktop as well.
 
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