Testing EaseUS Todo Restore

I usually use Windows’ built-in disk imaging software, but I’ve been testing EaseUS Todo Backup Free 9.1 as an alternative.

I backed up a Windows 7 x64 Ultimate machine to an external USB drive, first doing a full backup, then a differential.

I created an EaseUS Todo emergency disk on a thumb drive (WinPE version).

After booting from the thumb drive, I dropped to a command prompt and used these commands to clear the internal disk:

diskpart
sel disk 0
clean

That leaves the disk in an uninitialized state, just like it would be if you inserted a brand new disk.

I tried a partition check. Todo was still showing the old disk layout, but failed a partition check, advising me to reboot, which I did.

Todo still couldn’t see the disk as a restore target. I could not find a UI command for initializing the disk.

I dropped back to a command prompt and used commands from this thread to initialize the disk:

diskpart
sel disk 0
attributes disk clear readonly
online disk
convert mbr

After yet another reboot, Todo once again saw the internal disk as “unallocated” and let me choose it as a restore target. I restored from the differential backup and rebooted the computer. I was expecting to have to do MBR/startup repair, but to my surprise, the machine came up properly without further ado.

It would be nice if Todo provided commands for disk management from the emergency disk, but with the above commands, it should be possible to initialize new disks when necessary.