OS drive cloning for Windows

[andyptak]

I'm having problems with Acronis cloning my C drive. I've done it before - but now I have an outdated copy - and I have done it on my other machines. But Acronis can be a bit buggy at times and I thnk that because I have an OCZ Revodrive it keeps crapping out on me. The Revo is a RAIDED card rather than a drive in a bay and I don't think Acronis likes it.

Anyone have any suggestions? I also have Paragon, which I like, but it doesn't do RAID. I've also used Norton Ghost with disasterous results (is it just me?).

What I want is a bootable clone of my C so if anything goes wrong - as it did last week - all I have to do is boot off a USB connected clone.

Thanks.

[John.Murray]

Because of the storage device driver supporting the Revo, you will not be able to boot off an image accessible via a different storage method.  In addition Windows does not support booting nativeley from USB media (it does support booting WinPE installation environment).

That said - backup and recovery is relatively painless

Use the native windows 7 image backup:
Start | Backup | Select Create System image in the left panel and backup to an external USB drive.....

To restore, you'll need to provide the Disk Device Driver before you perform the restore:
If you haven't already, download and extract your driver from OCZ onto a spare USB thumbdrive.
Boot from Win 7 installation media - select Repair my Computer.  In the System Recovery Dialog, click the Load Drivers button and browse out to the driver on your USB thumbdrive.  After loading, select the Restore your computer using a system image.... option.

[andyptak]

Creating a system image right now.

Do I need to create a system restore disk too? Is that the Win 7 installation media that you refer to?

Thanks John

[John.Murray]

Yes - your installation disk will work fine; creating an additional system restore disk is never a bad idea .....

[andyptak]

Answering my own question here - the backup is finished and it has asked  if I want to create a bootable system repair disk - which it can't do because of an "invalid parameter" error message.

My DVD/CD drive is D and that is the only option suggested and pointed to. I don't know what else might be invalid. Duh.

[stamper]

Macrium free edition does a good job and widely recommended on

http://windowssecrets.com/forums/

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx