Acronis is a fantastic tool, but it's absolutely not possible to restore to a partition that is being used. Acronis can be installed onto a bootable CD, and restore your images that way? You won't have any activation problems as long as it's restored onto identical hardware that was used to backup the disk in the first place. Windows won't even work at all if the motherboard is different.

ok thanks madmonkey, I have Paragon drive backup 8.5 now, I have imaged my hd to a usb external hd. In the restore wizard it allows me to select the current active hard drive as the location to restore the full disk image containing two partitions to. But i'm not sure if this will actually work. In the help section it says A place to restore the archive to. Selecting the destination, please note - all contents on the disk selected for restoring purposes will be deleted during the operation.
The program allows me to build a recovery media set of disks for use when the os fails, which I can include the program itself. Even then if it can locate the external hd i'm not sure it could do a restore.
do you know if acronis can restore with the bootable cd from a backup on an external usb hard drive?
also do you think there is any way a restore of the full hard drive could work using paragon drive backup?
any help greatly appreciated,

thanks, jake

To be honest, I've not heard of Paragon until you mentioned it in this thread, no I'm not sure.

I do know that Acronis will see your external hard drive, no problems. In fact, that's one of the reasons why I use it. I have an external HDD with all the images of the various different types of PC I work with. If a HDD fails, then I just take the Acronis CD, and external HDD to that PC and do a restore. It's suprisingly easy, and probably the quickest I've used so far. I've never had a problem with it, and it's never failed me

Marked as Answered.