Friday, August 27, 2010

Acer Aspire & Macrium Recovery CD

I have been having 'difficulties' using a Macrium Recovery CD on my new Aspire - every attempt to boot to the CD resulted in an error :

Loading /install/vmlinuz.......
Loading /install/initrd.gz..........isolinux: Disk error 80, AX=xxxx, drive xx
Boot failed: press a key to retry...

The AX value was different most times, and I forget what the drive value was. No matter.

What it boiled down to was that even if I burned the ISO at slow speed it failed, something about my external DVD-RW drive it didn't like. So I did some research and found out how to make the iso into a bootable USB drive - which worked beautifully!

Now I can use Macrium to make backup images to a USB drive, copy them to my main backup repository, and then boot to a USB drive and restore from another one if I needed to. Peace of mind comes with a working disaster recovery method. :)