Problem with Seagate Disk Wizard

[bevills1]

Running Win2k SP4 I have a Seagate drive and downloaded Seagate Disk Wizard, installed it and selected "Make Bootable Media" to make a boot CD which boots, but selecting the program to run on boot gets to stage where it states "usb-storage: device scan complete" and freezes at that point. Has anybody had similar problems or know a possible solution?

[SLK001]

I've had problems running Seagate Drive Fitness Test from their bootable media (or at all) on one of my WIN2K SP4 machines. It turned out that the OS that they used for that program (DrDOS) has some problems operating with an Adaptec SCSI card in my system. You may be having similar problems.

[bevills1]

I have no SCSI card. I don't think the Disk Wizard I downloaded uses DOS because it shows "Powered by Acronis" on boot and appears to be some form of Linux to me based on command lines that scroll by during boot. Also I read somewhere that this Disk Wizard is a version of Acronis True Image.

[Poppa_Meth]

The newer version are a limited version of Acronis. Problem is Acronis has gone downhill. I've had trouble in the past with their products not wanting to boot correctly on some machines. All I can suggest is trying Paragon Drive Backup Express instead. I don't know exactly what you are trying to do and if the free version of Paragon will provide you with the features you need or not, but it's worth trying.

[bevills1]

Paragon Drive Backup Express seems to be for full drive backup and not for select partitions if I correctly interpret what's described at their web site. However, I found another solution that works well. I made a BartPE CD using the Seagate Disk Wizard plugin which I think is even better because GetDataBack and other useful programs with BartPE plugins can be included in the boot disk.

[Poppa_Meth]

Paragon Backup Express can do separate partitions. The full version is much better of course. I just hope you don't have a SATA drive. Acronis is notorious for having problems restoring to SATA drives. Almost every time I've done it, the restore goes fine but the sytem can't see the OS afterwords and you have to do some repair work to get into Windows correctly.

[bevills1]

I have Ghost 2003 that I've used to restore to SATA drive with no problems, and I was looking at Seagate Disk Wizard just as a backup to Ghost in case I have problems with Ghost. Do you know if Paragon Backup Express works in Win2k? I read where another imaging program doesn't work in Win2k, Macrium Reflect if I recall correctly.

[Poppa_Meth]

Yep it supports Win2K SP4. There is another very good one out there I've heard mentioned a lot. I think it was called Shadow Protect. Check out the boards at WildersSecurity for a quite few topics on the subject.

[bevills1]

Have you used Paragon Backup Express, and have you had any problems with it? I did a Google search that found some have had problems with it.

[Poppa_Meth]

I'm using the full version now and haven't had any issues, unless you count how slow it does differential backups.

[bevills1]

Is there a BartPE plugin for Paragon Backup Express?

[Poppa_Meth]

I doubt it in the express version. Another thing I've discovered with Express. It does not do compression. All backups are at full size. That limits it's usefulness to me. I guess you have to pay if you want it all!

[bevills1]

Can Paragon Backup Express restore larger partition image to smaller partition as long as data size doesn't exceed partition size? If not is there a free program that can restore image of a larger partition to a smaller partition as long as data size doesn't exceed size of smaller partition? Ghost 2003 can do it, but I've had problems with Ghost failing to recognize drives on some systems which makes it impossible to do restore using Ghost on those systems. I tried Seagate Disc Wizard with mixed results, but all failed in some way. Drive Image XML and others I've read about can only restore image to partition of equal or larger size. Are there any besides Ghost that can restore image of larger partition to smaller partition?

[Poppa_Meth]

I've honestly never tried to restore to a smaller partition, but I would imagine it wouldn't have a problem with that. I've only ever restored to a smaller partition once and that was with Acronis TI 9. Worked just fine though.