The 1B PP Essentials drive is recognized within Win 7 and I used Win 7 Image Backup to a partition on it. A win 7 Repair/Recovery disk and the Macrium Linux recovery disk to not recognize the PP drive whether plugged in from the start or removed and plugged in followed by a scanning refresh.
I have full image files in the two partitions of the PP drive that I repartitioned by shrinking one and adding another.
Laptop is an ACER Aspire 4830TG running Win 7 SP1.
Is there something in the PP or Acer BIOS that I am missing? I have not set any passwords, etc., on the PP.
I have seen other users recommend Macrium which can run on Win 7 but to restore an image on a crashed disk you need the Linux CD restore disk.
For the Win 7-64 repair disk it gives me an option of loading a system 32 driver but does anyone know which driver supports PP drive? The PP drive states it should function as a normal USB 2 drive without the WD driver installed.
Does the WD drive have any bios built in that would prevent it from being detected by the Win repair disk?
I do have an OEM recovery DVD set for a complete OEM state reinstall. In Win 7 I see the system files on the drive but I don’t think you can load a complete image while Win 7 is normally running.
The PP drive is recognized as a possible boot drive in the laptop bios and the Win repair disk. It is just not recognized as a logical drive (actually two since there are two partitions on the PP disk) to retrieve an image on in Win Repair from the CD.
In the sequence non-assigned disk letter order for the Win repair disk letters C, D, E represent two special private partions and then the normal working hd partion is E. F: is the DVD drive. The is also an X: drive letter but it only has a boot folder with boot.ini in it. None appear to be either of the two partitions on the PP drive.
I forgot I can go to the command line shell in the Win 7 repair disk to runthrough those letters and do a dir on them and attr. Then I can see if any of the letters reside on the PP. That still will not help me with the recovery though.
In either repair system only the first partition was recognized in the restore function although in the repair disk shell I could get to both partitions.
The PP would only mount in USB2 ports, not the USB 3 port under the repair disks even though it supposed to be backward compatible, under the repair disks. I think that was stated. I think you mentioned both of these ideas.
Finally from some where one of the two backup image folders had both xml and .zip images. I used Win Backup and also the Acer image backup manager (not the e-manager files only resident system) but the Acer just linked to the Win 7 backup/restore facility.
I’ll expand the first partition a bit and shrink the second as an extra area for non-image backup files to avoid confusion and insuring all works.
