Acronis Secure Zone

Hi guys,

My son is going to live with Grandma and I want to set up an easy way for him to launch a recovery by hitting F11. PC will be custom build, Windows XP Professional, 250GB SATA. I have Acronis T11. He is pretty bad as far as exposing his computers to spyware, and apart from Sys Recovery, I want a guaranteed fallback point that he can launch without me there.

The last time I experimented with this on my bench computer here in the shop, it wiped out the whole computer and I had to reload the OS, I guess because it was modifying the MBR and I could not get back to my normal OS environment. Question: Can you set up the recovery partition (I was thinking of reserving some unallocated space for the image) before you load the OS? I don't want to spend all that time with the OS, drivers, updates and activation and then have it all not work when I try to set up the Acronis Secure Zone. Anybody have an experience with this? I know it won't have anything to image, but I'm a little nervous from my previous experience.

Maybe use Windows Setup to create the OS partition and unallocated space, install very basic OS, and then try setting up Acronis? Any tips on getting there?

Thanks

I personally wouldn't bother... I would clone, ghost or whatever you want to a bootable DVD having moved my docs, email, address books, templates and other "system" user files to a second (logical) drive.

That way you have the master DVD(s), you set the bios to boot from DVD/CD first, he gets into trouble and boots with the dvd and restores. If he loses his copy of the dvds, you can copy your master and send him a new set.

The problem with restore partitions is that if the drive dies, it's gone... or the partition table corrupts or whatever. With DVDs you retain control.

Yeah, that's how I do it most of the time, regular Ghost with bootable disk. But my son would get confused by that I'm afraid, browsing to the gho file and so forth, he's just not that savvy. He's going to be clear across the country from me. I can always image the entire drive, even if I set up a recovery partition, in case the whole drive fails, but I would still like to give this a go. He is so bad, if he sees the tower sitting there, with no power cord attached, he can't figure out why the computer won't start.

Fair enough... but a batch file would take care of that burned onto the recovery dvd...

However, if you create a partition before installing the os and you don't hide it, then the system drive will be D: not C:

Why do you need to reserve the space before you put the os on?

You will want 3 partitions, a hidden, a boot and a data partition. The boot one should be created first, the hidden second and then the data partition.

I haven't tried Acronis Secure Zone... but I should have done... so I can't be more help than that.

I'm leaning toward your suggestion of a recovery dvd alright, that's the way I've always done it. I like your idea of embedding a batch file to get him started. I will set BIOS to look for optical before hard disk and he will always be ready.

Fair enough, let us know how it goes... did you buy Acronis yet?

Hard drives are every cheap.
You could easily use a second harddrive.
For the data as NooNoo suggests as well as the
image file. Then really all you would need is 1 cd.
The recovery cd with that batch file.

I've had Acronis TI v11 for awhile now, for Vista pc's mainly, just never tried (except that one time on my bench computer), the F11 bit. (You guys helped me get a bootable that would see SATA on restore the other day).

You know, I do have an extra hard drive or two kicking around, that might an answer... Thanks!

PS I have used Ghost 2003 forever for everything up to XP. Most reliable was make image file to hard drive, copy to DVD and boot with floppy. The reason I say that is that when I have tried to make a bootable DVD with image file enclosed, it boots OK, gets well into the recovery, and then suddenly calls for a second disk, despite the fact that the entire image is already on the disk. This ever happen to you guys? With bootable diskette and image on DVD, it is 100% success rate, never an issue.