Clone A Drive

Ah I think I see what yoyr trying to do Bill is and correct me if wrong is that you already have a cloned image of your laptops HD in an Acronis Image file, and what you wish to do is to basically do a restore of this saved image to your portable HD?

If this is correct then the message you have from Acronis is correct in that your portable is likely to only have one partition and in having one partition a cloned image will want to recreate itself to the whole partition, this is normal and correct.

To get around this you would have to have a second partition of your portable HD so that the recovery would not overwrite the existing data as you found out, but if the data on the portable is very important partitioning externals can be a pain, but do-able ( XPs disk Managment can do this but only easily on a empty drive and all you do is to delete the existing partition, recreate a smaller on and the rest is non-allocated in disk mgmt then you just format that non-allocated area, or better use an partition app that can do this on an already partitioned drive *still would need to backup the data in case of troubles )

Parted Magic should allow you to partition your external, but again I woudl backup all the data on that drive before partitioning it.

TBH, the best way and the one I use is to get a spare smaller external or internal HD and recover to that, then store away for such a time when you need it, but updating it every so often with new image file and on my Laptop I did same as ASUS in creating a split HD ( partitioned the original drive into two partitons )

 

You are using the wrong tool. I use Acronis v8. You want to image not clone your laptop hard drive.
I have an external 80GB hd attached by USB. I have several images of my desktop stored on this external drive.
Just today, I had to restore an image from march 10th. When that didn't solve my problem with a program, I restored an image that I made earlier today.
An Image restores your computer (all software, all data, all installed programs) to the way it was on the day it was made.

The best way to make the image, it not to run TI from inside windows.
1. Have your external hd powered up and attachd to your notebook
2. Put the TI rescue CD into your notebook and turn the nb on.
3. The nb will boot from the CD which puts the TI program into RAM on your computer. Be patient while it loads. Once it loads, you will see the screen exactly like you see when you run it from windows.
4. Select the first item "create an image" or something similar.
5. In the left pane you will see choices like your nb hard drive and your external hd which may be called D.
6. Select the external hd and in the box type a name like
full_image_20_March_2008
7. Acronis will add the .tib to the end
8. If asked for compression, use the default value; same for splitting - let the default as the one selected.
9. Acronis will make your image; to image to an external drive it takes about 1 minute per GB.
10. When it is done, you get a popup saying the image was successfully made.
11. Exit the program, remove the rescue CD and the nb will boot normally.

When you look in the hard drive, you will see several files called "full_image_20_March_2008" DO NOT remove any of them. These are all pieces of your image broken down into about 4GB sizes because of FAT32.
When you need to restore, put in the rescue CD again, wait till Acronis loads into RAM and this time, select restore image. You will look at the external drive and select full_image_20_March_2008, which has a 1 either before the .tib or something like .tib1 (I don't remember the labeling). That's the one you select and your notebook will be restored to it's March 20th image.