Have stopped using Image for Windows and am exclusively using Acronis True
Image. Only one minor disadvantage, to do this I run the thumb version of
Jaws on a separate drive. This means that I have to have a video intercept
installed on the image that I am creating. That's because you need to use a
screen reader like Jaws and set it to say all because, narrator, won't pick
up all the screens. Acronis True Image Home does have hotkeys and they do
work. Not a big deal really but, worth a mention. Big advantage, if I can
get into Windows and the True Image software is working then, I can tell
True Image to reinstall an image on to the partition that I am currently
working on in Windows. When it does this, True image deletes the partition,
reinstalls the image that I have chosen and brings up Windows again with the
new freshly installed partition. This takes around 10 minutes with my
system drive which, includes all of my audio applications already
authorised. I love it! It's saved my baking a few times and I will be
running the same image that I use on my system drive on a separate partition
that I will be using exclusively for beta testing. The cool thing is that
when beta testing various applications in the future, I won't have to
uninstall them. I can just reimage the drive in 10 minutes. I couldn't do
a reinstall of an application like Sonar in that time and have it
configured, just the way I want it.
Regards, Phil Muir
Accessibility Training
Telephone: US (615) 713-2021
UK+44-1747-821-794
Mobile: UK +44-7968-136-246
E-mail:
info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
URL:
www.accessibilitytraining.co.uk/ <http://www.accessibilitytraining.co.uk/>
-----Original Message-----
From: realmusicians-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:realmusicians-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Chris Belle
Sent: 30 January 2010 20:58
To: realmusicians-freelists.org
Subject: [realmusicians] backing up and dual booting
Just wanted to start a little discussion about back-up software and
imaging and such.
I've been playing with operating system configs and such and have
managed to create a dual boot system with the use of selected
software packages without any sighted help.
I am using two copies of xp at the moment and here's what I did.
One piece of software that I am now embracing is casper, I formerly
didn't care for it because it was window's only based, but since
casper can now boot from usb devices, you can run windows from a
thumb drive if you wish, then this makes it more valuable and also
although I think traditional methods of restoring without windows
being in the way are more secure and safer, ie, less likelihood of
viruses and such being transferred, it's still nice to be able to
restore partitions and such in windows only when desired.
Casper and the terrabyte unlimited products both ddos and windows
versions, and an old copy of partition magic were my main tools of choice.
I did use ghost, and drive snapshot too, but the main disadvantage of
ghost is that the dos side of things doesn't talk at all and your
limited to batch files and knowing ahead of time where your drives
are as you need the controller numbers and partition numbers to
accomplish this.
But with image for dos from terrabyte you can restore interactively
and with casper operating in only windows, if you have a second
partition somewhere that's got a copy of your OS on it, you can
restore to the version of the OS your not using currently.
It's helpful to keep a copy of your boot.ini file in another location
that has references to all your operating systems handy so you can
restore that configuration on the fly after restoring a partition.
My only problem is that I can't seem to get a copy of windows which
was installed on the first or only partition of a drive to boot from
the second or third partition of a drive and I think this is an nt
thing, 2k was even more picky about this sort of thing, but what I
did was to partition my third drive
in to several partitions it's a 300 gig drive, and each partition is
now less that 120 gigs.
When in dos it seems with sata drives you have to keep some factors
in mind, files larger that 2gb or partitions that are too large or
have too many files on them won't get read properly and you can't restore.
I was having this problem with image for dos until I made smaller
partitions and now things work well.
Image for windows will also resize partitions on the fly, some of
these backup softwares expect to have the same size drive or
partition to restore to and will puke if they don't see that.
That's the way drive snapshot is, at least with fat32 partitions.
I like to use fat32 for all the obvious reasons, at least on system
drives, I keep some ntfs partitions for large ISO files and other
things, but if you ever have a drive problem fat32 is much easier to deal
with.
So because drive snapshot has problems with resizing images, I'm
converting all my images to ghost or terra byte images.
So far if I had to tchose the two products I'd use exclusively, it's
be the terrabyte atuff for flexibility and accessibility and casper
for the window's only aspect and ease of use for the non-technical
person or command line challenged individual.
But casper's partitioning and drive c onfiguration facilities aren't
as advanced as even the old partition magic so you really need a
couple of different tools.
So I have my operating systems on a loan partition on my c drive
which is drive 0 in the bios, and the first partition of drive 1
which is the way it shows up in dos or the bios.
Of course windows changes things around so it's important to check
depending on whether your in dos or windows to make sure what's
refering to what.
A couple of good ways to help are making sure you always give your
drives meaningful volume labels and observing the size of the
partitions or drives.
What I did was to put an early unclutered installation of my studio
machine on the first partition of the second drive and leave the
hither to system drive alone, I didn't re-partition it because
remember, some of this drive software expects to see the same size
partition that was backed up when it restores, so until I get these
images re-sized, I'm playing it safe.
So we have gwo default places to back up or restore images to and
from and we can do so in windows or in dos.
I'm going to make a small partition on my third drive and make it the
first partition and see if I can get a third os to boot.
Right now according to the best information I have,
there are issues with the boot configurations with vista and windows
7 which make it hard to back up properly since microslop changes the
way in which things boot and one has to adjust the boot record to
make these new operating systems boot properly when one deploys an
images or such, and I'm not properly using w7 yet, but we'll be
nailing these issues down soon I hope.
Anyway, that's some of what we've been doing after christmas here at
the studio.
So if you don't want to have to install from scratch a complete
operating system, you can use a copy of the one you already have
installed if you put it on the same place on another drive in regards
to partition position.
There's probably a way to fix or change this in a boot record.
I bet DJX knows some real nuggets about this sort of thing 'grin'.
But anyone feel free to chime in with experiences because we all need
to keep our machines fresh and well oiled to make all that great
music and also to do daily things, and I'm a bad boy,
I swore I wouldn't do anything else with this machine but studio
things, but it's just too
atractive to use your fastest machine in the house to do everything, so
one needs to learn to manage those dangerous habbits 'grin'.
