[realmusicians] Re: backing up and dual booting

  • From: "Phil Muir" <info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <realmusicians@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:17:54 -0000

Chris wrote: snip, Does acronus resize partitions seamlessly for both ntfs
and fat32 drives?


Phil replied: I don't know.  You will have to check on the website.



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: 21 February 2010 04:27
To: realmusicians@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [realmusicians] Re: backing up and dual booting


That's great Phil.

I don't like windows only solutions, that's the only reason I never
persued acronus.

If for some reason you couldn't get back in to windows you'd have to
holler for a buddy or your wife.

Does acronus resize partitions seamlessly for both ntfs and fat32 drives?

I quit using drive snapshot because it won't resize partitions for fat32.

But ghost and image for windows will do both.

I haven't tried image for dos on resizing partitions yet.

And I've been lazy and am not using the newest version because they
changed the disk format so the images aren't backwardly compatible
and I've got a good library of the older images.

But with several bootable windows partitions, we're generally ok,
except just incase that worm gets loose and runs amuck in windows,
we'll want that low level access.

Also image will re-do mbr code.

I have a couple of old dos utils which will save and write boot code
too, and also cmos settings.

Atleast the first 128 bits which most even modern bios share.


At 07:34 AM 2/20/2010, you wrote:
>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'.



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