Windows 7 Backup, USB sticks and USB HD's....

I'm having a little difficulty with Windows 7 Backup. I can create an image fine, and have made a bootable USB flash drive that takes the place of the windows recovery CD quite nicely. The problem is that neither my desktop nor my laptop can see images on an external USB harddrive. I tried to solve this by copying the USB drivers for the laptop on to the stick, with the somewhat perplexing outcome that the desktop can now see the USB harddrive but the laptop still can't.... The Drive shows up fine under normal operation and I've been copying files too and from it with no problem at all.

The only other issue I've had is that when creating an image on the laptop using a USB 3 port the drive disconnects and reconnects at exactly the same time everytime, causing the image creation to fail, but works fine on USB 2 ports. I'm semi-convinced this is a power management issue, and had put it aside until I had a disk image safely in the vault.

Any ideas much apreciated.

Are the "sticks" formatted to NTFS?

I read somewhere that the allocation units on boot partition should be 4k. Windows 7 will not recognise 64K from boot.
Do you have hidden files view ticked in control panel folder option

Edited by flippery (Wed 17-Oct-12 22:07:09)

Bah, gone back to acronis.... it just works... even if I do have to upgrade to get it to see modern hardware.... I now have a bootable USB key with an emergency bootdrive backup on it hanging from my keyring. Job done!

Thanks.

sounds good, must look at acronis

In reply to a post by flippery:

sounds good, must look at acronis

It's an excellent piece of kit that I wouldn't be without. Ten minutes or so to restore an entire partition/drive is priceless! If you use the boot media, there's no need to have the program installed - Simply boot from CD.
Older versions are often available on the cheap and at one time, they were giving it away free.

There are various flavours of Acronis, which one are you using? I've always been a Ghost man myself, but I got a free Acronis with an SSD recently, and my Ghost is so old I wouldn't actually trust it with Windows 7's NTFS, which has also arrived here recently.

Suggestions welcome.

I used to use Ghost until I found Acronis several years ago. I currently use Acronis 2011 Plus Pack.

In reply to a post by Anonymous:

There are various flavours of Acronis, which one are you using? I've always been a Ghost man myself, but I got a free Acronis with an SSD recently, and my Ghost is so old I wouldn't actually trust it with Windows 7's NTFS, which has also arrived here recently.

Suggestions welcome.

I have ghost and did use it to transfer my main system to ssd. Is windows 7. I used it as it came with my ssd.

However.

It was a very tedious and troublesome process, its not a simple wizard you follow and job done, I installed ghost first on my system and the first thing I noticed was how big it was, seems very excessive for a backup app and its also slow to load the app indicating more heavy code. I then did the backup which if I remember correctly went fairly well although I had to pick some non default options, I knew what to pick knowing how windows partitions work etc. but someone else may not have done. I then made a norton ghost boot disk. Swapped the drives keeping the original disconnected. Booted into norton ghost. Then I manually picked the main windows partition to restore to the ssd (I skipped the hidden 100meg one), then I restored it with a size smaller than the max ssd so the ssd had more free space for write wear levelling. This all wasnt too complex but I did have to pick non default options again, defaults would have made it fail. Then I had to boot windows 7 install media because the current restore state on the ssd was not bootable so obviously at this point most people would be lost, I then had to run a repair command from the install media to install boot files to the ssd at which point the ssd is then bootable. Finally booted up the ssd media.

After this was still other issues. Not all now resolved.

The ssd had a corrupt filesystem, so something went wrong on the process, chkdsk fixed it and I dont have any noticeable impact.
When the original hdd was reconnected windows flipped out as it had the same ID as the ssd, but going into the disk manager and trying to mount it made windows generate a new ID for it fixing the issue.
Finally there is a drive labelling problem. In 99% of apps including windows explorer my ssd is the C: drive. However some apps use raw drive letters 2 such apps are both microsoft ones, windows firewall and resource monitor. In these 2 apps my ssd is not C: its instead D:0, I later found out this occured because windows is not very good at labeling drives. When I first booted up the migrated install all my other drives were still connected accept the original OS drive, windows then detected a hdd on another controller before the ssd (even tho ssd was boot device) and as such the ssd was considered to be the 2nd drive not the 1st and this led to the weird drive label issue which is not fixed right now. On unix operating systems this doesnt have such an issue as drives can be given custom labels and even if they not they assigned on each bootup based on where they connected not just once and then remembered like windows does. It gets even worse, the first time I did this I left the old boot hdd connected which resulted in a non operable windows system, as my ssd although the boot device was given a F: drive letter. So it actually took me 2 attempts to get it working.

Now windows is running fine aside from the issue in the 2 microsoft apps, in resource monitor its just a cosmetic issue but on windows firewall its not as that assigns rules based on program location, so anything with C: on it is now invalid and has to be set again with D:0. I am put off using ghost again to do another migration with all hdd's disconnected, plus its now too long ago I would lose recent changes so I will likely just reinstall windows 7 on this machine at some point to clean it up. Still making backups with ghost now but am probably going to try another app like acronis because almost everyone who uses acronis reccomends it. They obviously do so for a reason.

As for windows 7 backup I dont think its an imaging program so I wouldnt use that for backups, acronis is an imaging program (so is ghost) so they better choices than windows 7 backup.

I feel ghost with all its bloat is missing simple things like automatically handing the drive lettering issue on migrations, on automated backups is no function to remove backups X days old, luckily I am backing up to a 2TB drive but obviously it will eventually fill up if I dont manually house clean it.

Norton ghost did correctly align my SSD partition as well. So it maybe old but its not ancient, just a poorly developed app I feel.

There's a fully functional 30 day trial available if you want to see how it works.