Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

Acronis True Image Home 2009 is one of the best ways to backup your computer.

Full disk imaging protects your data quickly, efficiently and lets you restore either by file or entire disk.

For the month of June, you can save 35% off of Acronis True Image 2009 with this coupon code and link combination:

Click here for Acronis True Image 2009 Home

Use Coupon Code: 1D4-FDN-MV6

Protect your data right now!

How do I replace a laptop hard drive?

How about why?

The answers to both of those questions can be found in this new video:

The hard drive I was replacing in this video was junk; no data recovery possible. Emphasizes the importance of good backups, right?

You might also replace a hard drive if you are upgrading to a larger one. In that case, I would have used Acronis True Image to clone the hard drive to the newer unit.

The one good thing about a bad economy is that some companies bring their head out into the light of day and realize they can stimulate sales with coupons and deals.

Acronis has good products at pretty good prices; but the SMB products (server software mostly) are a bit expensive.

So here are some coupons for Acronis products that you can use to save some money:

If you are booting a PC built on the Asus P5KC motherboard using the Recovery Boot CD from Acronis True Image, then depending on which version of Acronis True Image you are using, you may not see any hard drives to back up or restore; other than the USB drive you are backing up to (or restoring from).

The reason may be the settings in your BIOS.

On the first screen of BIOS settings, near the bottom, is SATA Configuration. Select that and the top option is named, suprisingly, SATA Configuration also. The setting you probably want to operate with normally is “Enhanced”, but certain versions of Acronis True Image won’t then see the hard drives.

Change this setting to “Compatible” until you are finished with the Acronis True Image operation, then change it back to enhanced.

This doesn’t seem to effect Acronis when run through Windows, just from the Recovery Boot CD. There may be other Asus (and other brands) boards effected, but the P5KC is the one I know for sure.

I just blogged about a problem with an Asus P5LD2 Deluxe PC last week and it’s a nightmare getting all the parts RMA’d and providing a loaner PC in the interim.

What do I do when it’s my own PC that’s going south? Well, that’s what happened beginning last Sunday when I woke up to a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on my primary PC, an Asus P5KC.

During the course of the day I was able to get it up and running several times. Sometimes it would boot and I could do a “chkdsk /f” which it would perform on the next boot up and it would be fine – only to BSOD, not always with the same error code.

Once I had to get out the XP CD in order to boot because even the Command Console wouldn’t work. (Keep your XP CD handy!)

Since the hard drive was always corrupted I suspected that the drive was shucking out, but SpinRite not only didn’t show any problems but didn’t help either. Next suspect might be memory, but with memory from Crucial I didn’t put much faith in that theory. I changed out the hard drive just to be sure, restoring from a drive image made with my favorite backup program and kept looking for other hints.

Then in  the process of swapping out the hard drive, I practically burned my hand on the video card. The video card I was using was a 512MB PCI-E card from Asus that was designed to be fanless. I get sick of video cards whose cheapo cooling fans either get noisy or just plain die; requiring me to provide a loaner and then RMA the card to the manufacturer. And nobody likes a noisy fan.

In this case, maybe it’s not the best design, who knows. What I did was quick order an XFX video card from a favorite vendor with free shipping and a new video card was at my door the next day (I know, the free shipping isn’t supposed to be that quick, but usually is).

For now it looks like the problem is solved. But the keys to quick recovery are these:

• Good drive image backup
• A detailed list of installed software and configuration changes
• Knowing where all the CD’s, etc are for the rebuild
• Knowing where to go for the right hardware at the right prices

Back up and running, solid as a rock. A good feeling.

I have had a lot of views and follow up questions to some videos I have had on hard drive data recovery. On the one hand I’m thrilled that so many people find this information valuable to them; on the other hand I’m sad to see that so many people are in need of recovering data off of failed drives.

Computer backup is not difficult, expensive or even very time consuming anymore.

You can schedule Acronis True Image to automatically backup to an external USB hard drive on a regular basis. (I recommend a 7200rpm hard drive and a warranty longer than 1 year.)

Please don’t think your hard drive will last forever; even if it’s brand new it can fail at any time.

Last week I tackled some brutal Chicagoland traffic and attended an Acronis Certified Engineer training course. The course was well done and with a small class size was very worthwhile. As a bonus I took a knowledge test of the Acronis True Image software.

I passed.

It’s always encouraging to meet with other people in the same line of work that have experienced positive results using the same tools that I have chosen to use. One of the others in attendance has been using the product about as long as I have, dating back to version 7 (several years ago).

The new Acronis True Image Echo is quite a product, and there is even an SBS (Microsoft Small Business Server) version out now.

You can read more here.

Acronis True Image Home is now in version 11. This venerated computer backup software was great in version 10, but they have bested that with the new version 11.

I have written often about how this easy to use, inexpensive software is a must have for anyone with data they hold dear.

Acronis makes it easy to backup your data and more importantly, easy to restore your data when necessary.

I simply love the ability to “mount” a backup image and explore it just like another drive on my computer. Makes individual file restore a cinch. I’ve even use this method to grab drivers for a video card or other device from an old C:\Windows\System32 directory from an out of data backup.

If you have an older version, I suggest upgrading to the new version 11 of Acronis True Image Home.

If you have never tried it I suggest the Free Trial Download of Acronis True Image Home 11.

Or heck, take my recommendation and Buy It Now!.

The important thing is this: PROTECT YOUR DATA!

Acronis True image makes it easy, fast, and inexpensive to be fully protected.

Here is a Video on YouTube showing me using Acronis True Image (workstation).

I had a Pentium 4 2.4 processor floating around that would only eBay for about $25. So I decided to see how little I could spend to turn it into a decent computer.

I found the Asus P4V8X-MX motherboard was feature packed and very inexpensive. 1 GB of memory from Crucial.com was less than $75. The SATA hard drive I had laying around had XP installed on it from an Asus P5B or P5L installation, not sure which, but surprised the heck out of me when it booted into windows with just a few drivers missing.

Since more and more of the problems I solve are regarding Windows Vista, I decided to see how Vista would fare on this board.

So I downloaded and ran the Windows Upgrade Advisor. After doing its thing, the advisor reported that it had encountered an error (thanks for all of that detail, Microsoft); and perhaps I should re-download the latest version (did it change in 15 minutes?) and try again.

Forget it. Install Vista anyway.

I booted with the Windows Vista Ultimate DVD (Dell OEM copy) and chose to install to a new partition. Wisely, I had only allocated about half of the 120GB disk to the Windows XP Pro installation.

With Vista, there really aren’t too many questions to answer during the install so I came back later to see how it was doing. I had to press the power button since it had gone to sleep waiting for me (fitting, as I have fallen asleep so many times waiting for Windows) but essentially it was all done.

The Asus P4V8X-MX board did not come with Vista drivers and I didn’t download any. Yet everything worked; no yellow exclamations in device manager; NIC, sound, and an old Asus GeForce MX 400 AGP video card all worked perfectly. The P4V8X-MX has video on the board making it a great value, but I figured AGP video with its own RAM would perform better – and the card was just gathering dust anyway.

So I guess my advice when Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor reports an error is to just go ahead anyway.

With one BIG caveat!:

I had backed up the PC first, even though I didn’t care about the XP install, with Acronis True Image software to a USB hard drive.

When I was done I now had a dual boot, Windows XP Pro, Windows Vista Ultimate, computer. Runs great on both.

Absolutely; sort of. If you own a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive.

What you get is a basic version of Acronis True Image Home with just the basic features.

But you CAN do a full image backup and restore. Not only that, it surprised the heck out of me to find out that you can mount an image as a drive letter, explore with Windows Explorer, and copy files from that image if you want to.

Acronis True Image Software and a USB hard drive is an awesome combination.

Here are the details and the links:

For Seagate Hard drives click here.

For Maxtor Hard drives click here.

When you decide you love the program so much you want the full version, please come back here to buy through a link on my website. Thanks.