Factory settings and Acronis true image

lovesgshp

Hope someone can help on this, as am totally confused!!

Have just backed up the C & D drives ( partitioned 60Gb into 14 for C and 35 for G) on my Sony Vaio VGN FS115B, to a external hard drive using Acronis true image 2010. Both seem to have copied OK, which is good I hope.

So a few questions:
1) the C drive is just about full (2Gb left), and the D still has 21Gb left.
If I do a factory restore, does this wipe both partitions and let me resize to better sizes?
2) Acronis says to create a reboot disk, but the DVD drive will not write and only reads, as probably too old. Therefore will the external drive be recognised so that I can only move what I need?

I only use this computer for a few things now, It's XP3 with 512Mb memory, as it is quite a few years old and W7 on the desktop does not always recognise some of the old hardware.

Thanks in advance

NiftyDigits

Upgrade to 1GB for a tenner and run a clean install with a Windows XP disc. You won't have all the Sony crud slowing it down and you can create the partition sizes yourself.

lovesgshp

NiftyDigits wrote: »

Upgrade to 1GB for a tenner and run a clean install with a Windows XP disc. You won't have all the Sony crud slowing it down and you can create the partition sizes yourself.

Thanks Nifty. I do not have a XP disk though to run a clean install!!

JJ_Egan

If I do a factory restore, does this wipe both partitions and let me resize to better sizes?

Reverts to the out of the box state then you can resize partitions .

closed

xp is about 3GB, so just move your data to g, clear up crap with ccleaner, and wiztree

and it will work fine with 2GB of free space

unless it's incredibly old, the drive should write CD's, dvd writing isn't supported by default in xp, so you'll have to use imburn or nero if you wish to write to dvd's and it is actually a dvd writer.

lovesgshp

Thanks Closed.
I checked on Windirstat, which was already installed and it says Windows is using 6.4 Gb on the C drive
1.8 Gb is installer, $hf-mig$ is 1.2 Gb, system 32 1.1 Gb, ie8updates 557 mb and then the rest going lower.
Program files are using 2.1 Gb, Docs and Settings 1.9 Gb.

lovesgshp

NiftyDigits wrote: »

Upgrade to 1GB for a tenner and run a clean install with a Windows XP disc. You won't have all the Sony crud slowing it down and you can create the partition sizes yourself.

You are out of PM space !!!

lovesgshp

Think I may have done something wrong!!!
Over the weekend, I went into factory restore and let it run. When it had finished, it had resized the C drive to just under 28Gb and D to 21? It reloaded XP but with SP2 and then I had to find net framework to be able to download SP3.
OK got that far and windows started its updates (151) in total at the time. I had about 10Gb free on C after the recovery, but have managed to get the used space down to about about 11 Gb by deleting some unwanted progs, Vaio wallpaper and also the $NT uninstall files. Used space is nearly as much as before the factory restore, with less on it, or so I think.
The only new programs that went on to C are Avast, Ccleaner, Adobe reader X1, Malwarebytes and Firefox.
Any ideas and thanks in advance?

Gyro

If you want a decent free Partition Manager you could have a look at this one from Easeus.

http://download.cnet.com/EaseUS-Partition-Master-Free-Edition/3000-2248_4-10863346.html

There's also a free image backup tool like Acronis if you want an alternative

http://download.cnet.com/EaseUS-Todo-Backup-Free/3000-2242_4-10964460.html

They do make other tools as well, though can't remember offhand what they are.

When you ran Windirstat did you have "Show unknown space" or something similar ticked? That can be a surprising chunk of disk space sometimes.

Gyro

I would also not be absolutely confident of Acronis backups in XP. My experience, a few years back, was that although Acronis reported it had backed up successfully, come showtime, when you absolutely needed to restore your broken XP system, Acronis would NOW report that the image was corrupted and was thus useless.

This happened to me more than once on XP, although to be fair they seemed to have cured it in Vista. But I've never truly trusted them ever since.

I think the only way you can be SURE of an Acronis XP backup image is if you use the image to do a restore as soon as you've created it. Just as a test!

Just a heads up.

(Though, perhaps they've cured it with an update since then, - maybe.)

lovesgshp

Thanks Gyro.
I am going to try and delete as much of the rubbish off the restore of the system as I can, i.e Sonic, netmeeting etc. If I can get it down to a reasonable size, then I hopefully can get some of the original things back.
At the moment it is booting up fast, so I will take it slowly, as do not want to go through the nightmare of getting all the updates, service packs once more.
Thanks again