User's Manual

9. Data recovery with Acronis True Image Home

2010 Netbook Edition

The ultimate purpose of data backup is recovery of the backed up data when the original is lost due

to hardware failure, fire, theft or just erroneous deletion of some important files.

There may be various reasons for recovering your system - from unstable operation after installing a

new application, driver or Windows update to complete failure of the system hard drive or

replacement of the old hard drive by a new larger one. In addition, it may be necessary to recover

either only the system partition or the entire system disk comprising several partitions including

hidden ones. Acronis True Image Home 2010 Netbook Edition provides for all these cases, though

details of recovery may differ. In any case, it is better to perform system recovery when booting from

the rescue media.

On the other hand, recovery of a data disk/partition or files and folders is usually performed in

Windows.

9.1. Recovering your system partition

Let's first consider the simplest case - recovery of the system partition to the original location on the

original hard disk drive.

As recovery of the system partition is one of the most important operations, it requires careful

preparation even when you just want to recover a previous "known good" Windows state. While

preparing for recovery you need to:

a) create and test Acronis bootable rescue media. For more information on testing media see Testing

bootable rescue media (p. 23);

b) boot from the rescue media and validate the backup you want to use for recovery. Such validation

is very important because Acronis True Image Home 2010 Netbook Edition deletes the target

partition (the system partition in this case) when starting partition recovery, so you may find yourself

without your system and applications if the backup file is corrupted. In addition, there were reports

from users that a backup archive that has been successfully validated in Windows is declared

corrupted when being validated in the recovery environment. This may be due to the fact that

Acronis True Image Home 2010 Netbook Edition uses different device drivers in Windows and the

recovery environment.

c) assign unique names to the disks and partitions used on your computer. This is strongly

recommended because the drive lettering in Windows and in the recovery environment may differ. If

you have not done this before making the backup, you can assign names now. The names will help

you in finding the drive containing your backups as well as the target system partition.

d) optionally check the system hard drive for errors using Microsoft's Chkdsk utility, which is part of

Windows.

Assuming that you have carried out the above, let's proceed with recovery.

Attach the external drive if it contains the backup archive to be used for recovery and make sure that the drive is

powered on. This must be done before booting from Acronis rescue media.