Cant find disks when booting from recovery media
=> Question 1:
I have three disks in my computer: Primary disk is a SSD plus two WD 512GD disks.
All these disks are connected to the SATA controller on the motherboard. I have no RAID arrays.
OS is windows 8.
All disks appear in the BIOS and in Windows......however..... in a past life the two WD disks used to be members of a RAID array. When I installed Win 8 I had to use DISKPART to futz with them so Windows would recognize them.
So..... Win 8 finds the drives they are working just fine. I used Acronis to make a test backup to one of them.
I created a recovery DVD and booted from it just to see if I could recover a test file. Unfortunately the WD disks do not appear in the list of disks to restore from. Why is that?
=> Question 2:
The following is a cut-and-paste from the help file topic titled "Preparing for recovery":
"b) Boot from the rescue media and validate the backup you want to use for recovery. This is necessary because, when a backup is validated in the recovery environment, the program sometimes declares it corrupted though it has been successfully validated in Windows. This may be due to the fact that True Image 2013 uses different device drivers in Windows and in the recovery environment. If True Image 2013 considers the backup corrupted, it will not proceed with recovery."
It looks to me like this says there is a good chance I wont be able to restore because of driver issues. Bottom line: What can I do to ensure I will have a valid backup?


- Log in to post comments

Hi Pat, I built the system myself last week. The motherboard is ASUS P9x79 pro, cpu is i7-3920k. The bios is UEFI I dont think that can be disabled. I dont have secure boot. BIOS is current as of yesterday. All the drivers including the Intel SATA driver are current. Windows Device manager shows no problems. I can read/write the disks with no problem in Windows.
Just for giggles I formatted the disk I backed up too, backed up again, and rebooted from the recovery media. Believe it or not, one of the disks is now visible to ATI but it not the one that I backed up to. I looked at the disks with DISKPART again (as if I know what i'm doing). Nothing jumps out at me as being abnormal i.e. nothing says "ERROR" and the disks, partitions, and volumes for both drives appear to be identical.
- Log in to post comments

When you say that you cannot see the disks, you are talking about the case where you use ATI from the recovery CD, right? Not from Windows, right?
- Log in to post comments

>> I can read/write the disks with no problem in Windows.
- Log in to post comments

Yes. You need to enable legacy BIOS to be able to boot on the recovery CD and see your disks normally, I presume.
- Log in to post comments

I have purchased 2 new seagate 3tb drives for backups, but when using the rescue media the only drives that show up are the internal hard drives. I have other smaller hard drives and they show up just fine and I am able to perform backups just fine. Just to elaborate a little more that when acronis starts and does the scan for hard drives it shows my drive but it doesn't show the used or available space and it does show that it is ntfs but thats it.
- Log in to post comments

Honeywell,
Are these new drives blank at the moment? If they are, try using the 'Add Disk' function from within TI, this might initialise them allowing the recovery media to see them, alternatively it might be possible that Linux doesn't have a driver allowing TI to see the drives. Are the drives showing up within Windows?
- Log in to post comments

Thanks for your response Colin, I have contacted seagate and their tech support said that it is a problem with the size being above 2 TB, so I partitioned the drive to be 2TB and then one with the remainder. The drives do show up in windows and I can copy to and from the drives. It is just once I use the rescue media it goes through the procedure and it performs its initial steps it shows the drives then I click next to specify a location to back up to and they are not there. Not sure what you meant by 'add disk' from within TI. I did do a (quick) format drive to initialize in windows
- Log in to post comments

Honeywell,
What is your version of Windows and what is your version of Acronis True Image (ATI)?
- Log in to post comments

Windows is 2003 server r2 and ATI is Acronis True Image Echo Server for Windows
- Log in to post comments

Echo is more than a few years out of date, I doubt that it knows about drives greater than 1TB or so. I think you will either have to partition the drives into 1TB partitions or a variant thereof. ABR11.5 does understand 3TB drives.
It is down to the fact that when Echo was current Linux was not 3Tb drive aware single as 3TB drives were not generally around at that time.
- Log in to post comments

I am using a HP Pavilion DV7 laptop, running Windows 7 Pro. I have had Acronis installed on my syster for approximately 3 years. My system has two discs install. The primary drive (C) is a WD 1TB SATA, and the second disc is a 500 MB drive that came with the system. I had two images of the C drive stored on the second disk. Recently I had a virus on my system and wanted to recover to the latest Acronis archive image stored on the second disc.
I had previously created a bootable recovery media. I inserted it in my CD drive and started the boot process. I received a message the said that the system could not find the OS. Assuming that the media was bad, I went to another system, installed Acronis and generated a new copy of the Bootable recovery media. when I tried to boot to it on my defective system, after the Acronis Loader message, The that same message indicating that there was not OS appeared.
Questions: Did I miss something when I created the Bootable media? Do I need to get the latest version? Does anyone know what might have happened?
I am an occasional user and not highly technically oriented concerning these types of issues. I seldom encounter times when I would need to reinstall my system.
I would appreciate any insights. Thanks.
HANK
P.S. I happenen to have a copy of rebootale media from another individual (a repair tecknician) which did boot on my system and I was able to reinstall my system from and from a much older copy of an Acronis archive image.
- Log in to post comments

Hank,
For some reason I suspect the recovered image hasn't marked the disk as Active. If you have Disk Director or another disk utility tool such as GParted you can run this from a boot environment and make your disk active. Alternatively if you have a Windows install DVD DiskPart can be run to make the disk active, but using DD or GParted or similar is easier to use.
- Log in to post comments