ABR11 Restore gets "Failed to copy disk" OR "Cannot resize the volume"
I am upgrading all the drives in our office desktop machines at work from 500GB WD Blues to Intel 120GB SSD's. They all currently back up nightly with ABR11 17437. I have already successfully performed VOLUME restores on two machines to the smaller SSD's so I could manually changed the C: drive partition alignment to the proper one for 4k sector SSD's during the restore process. NO PROBLEM! All went well...until the third machine.
The third machine I am trying to restore is all the same hardware, same SSD I am trying to image. However...I get errors trying to restore this one every time. If I do a volume restore like I've done I can choose my target disk (SSD), pick MBR to go there, pick system reserved to go there....but when I get to the C: NTFS partition and try to select the remaining unallocated space on the target drive I get the following errors:
"Cannot perform the action"
"Cannot resize the volume"
I have also tried to do a disk restore instead of volume and if I do that, the moment I click on the SSD as the restore destination I get the following:
"Failed to copy disks"
I cannot proceed further. I have tried creating a separate one of full backup instead of the existing backups we had. No change. There are only two things different about this one I can think of:
1) This machine has virtualbox installed with a small XP Vm on it.
2) It had until recently had some old virtual disks on it which made it too large to resize to the 120GB SSD. I had deleted that data and brought down the used space to only 50GB. A full backup in Acronis confirms the backed up data size to be only 50GB.
I am at a loss here!
I used the same centralized plan to backup this machine as well as the others. When looking at the archive and full backup I show original data size as 45.68GB, backup up data size as 45.68GB, and occupied space as 26.32GB. During the restore dialogs when the individual volumes are shown, if I right click and click "information" I get the "View Volume Properties" for the C: NTFS volume. Under the GENERAL section it shows used space as 52.28GB, free space 413.4GB and total size 465.7GB. Under FILE SYSTEM section it shows NTFS, size as 465.7GB, but "Total Information Size" as 0 bytes(?!) Is that what you were referring too?
I have tried a restore to larger disk. I can restore the volume to the larger disk but I CANNOT resize it to fill the extra space. That sound like maybe it is somehow switching to sector by sector! I am currently setting up another new full backup and will try again. I made sure I do not have sector by sector checked. Should enable the option to ignore bad sectors?
I will report back the results of this new backup and restore attempt.
1) I just finished another clean full backup (separate manual plan) and restore and same problem. I targeted the larger (1.5TB) drive I have and during restore of the C: NTFS volume I CANNOT re-size the volume.
2) I just tried a third time, enabled ignore bad sectors, and also changed from using the microsoft VSS to Acronis VSS. No joy. Always same result. Cannot resize partition.
3) I just now ALSO tried simply booting to most recent ABR11 media and cloning basic disc. I immediately get an error than the disk is not big enough!
I am at a loss why this one machine is doing this.
Ok update. Did some more digging and apparently there was some kind of hidden or unmovable file in the system that was screwing with it's ability to be resized. I realized this finally when I simply tried to resize the partition from within windows of the machine in question. I was only showing about 50GB used space but disk management would only let me resize the C: partition of the 500GB drive down to about 250GB! I could not go smaller. Reading around I found other people have run across this and in some circumstances disabling hibernation, page file, and system restore had allowed them to resize properly. I tried all three of those things but no luck. In the end I used EASEUS partition manager free version to successfully resize the volume down to about 60GB. I then backed up once more (using an incremental based off my original central plan) and was able to successfully image back to the SSD. Afterwards I booted up and was able to re expand the volume to fill out the rest of the 120GB SSD.
All is ok now.
This may happen if backup si created in sector-by-sector mode (IIRC backup can switch to sector-by-sector mode if it encounters filesystem error). If you used exclusions to reduce amount of backed up data, original free space is considered 'occupied' space and if it is larger than 120 GB, restore to this SSD won't be possible, even if amount of data (after exclusions are applied) is small What is shown in 'occupied space' in volume properties in the dialog where archive and items to restore is selected? 0 bytes is a sign of sector-by-sector backup. I'd also check it it is possible to restore this volume with resize at all, even on a large hdd.
I have a 1TB boot disk (windows 7 pro) with about 850 GB used, of which about 800 GB is in a folder with video files. I want to make an image of this disk on a much smaller drive, without all the video files. I have used 'exclusions' to successfully 'filter' out the video folder, and my backup is less than 80 GB. But Acronis Backup 11.5 cannot restore this backup to a 150 GB drive, saying 'cannot resize the volume'.
I read your post that using 'exclusions' does not cause the space to appear unoccupied. Therefore, is there 'any' way around this issue? I presume I can delete all the video files from the hard drive first, then make a backup, but is there any other way around this?
Thanks
2)
As far as I know - there is no workaround - you need a 850 GB target disk. If you have some virtualization software installed that can use thin provisioning for virtual disks, you can create a VM with 850 GB disk, restore the backup on it inside VM using bootable media, then backup this virtual disk again. Virtual disk's storage file will not grow more than 80 GB - the actual size of occupied data.
Thanks. I have just successfully restored the 'filtered' image file to my VMware workstation host, and with thin provisioning, as you said, the actual disk space used by the VM is small. Further - I was able to use disk manager inside of the VM to shrink the volume down to a small size. But this machine is used for intense video transcoding, and running as a VM is not ideal.
Here's my overall scenario, and what I'm trying to achieve. I have a laptop with a 1 TB drive, but most of it is occupied by videos which I do have backups of 'off disk'. I want to take regular backups of my machine for 'safety', and I'm not too comfortable with incrementals/differentials at the boot disk level. So I want to take regular 'full' images with Acronis, excluding the video files. This not only speeds up the backup, but also occupies less space, obviously. If I had a real disk failure, then I'd definitely go get a new 1TB HD, but for 'validation' purposes, I like to occasionally restore the image back to a spare disk and boot it, but my spare drives are all relatively small.
I guess the fact that I can restore to a VM is good enough for 'validation' purposes.
The fact I could do a successful P2V operation got me thinking, though. Is there any inexpensive tool in the Acronis lineup that will do V2P - allow me to convert a VM back to a physical machine?
If you restored to VM using 'recover as new VM' or used Universal Restore feature, restore process may have changed the drivers in the restored machine. Otherwise, it's restored as-is, and after you restored it to VM and re-backuped, you can restore the backup to the physical spare drive, to check the real-world scenario, where factory recovery partitions, etc may work during boot process not like in VM. If it works, you may consider partitioning you HDD to have a separate system partition.
V2P can be achieved with Acronis Universal Restore - and it's included in all Acronis Backup licenses since 11.5 Update 3 (current version). It doesn't operate with vmdk disk files - you need a backup of VM as a .tib file.
Thanks. What are the practical ways to backup a VM as a .tib file? I presume I could install Acronis Backup inside the VM (actually, it's already installed there since it was installed in the machine when I took the backup). So this would be a case of Acronis Backup running 'inside' the VM, and pushing an image of the machine out to a .TIB file somewhere? Is there anyway to use a standalone boot CD (or ISO thereof) to do this?
Both are possible, boot CD can be used too. It detects VMware Workstation network adapter - so you can use shared folders of the host or us hosts's connection to access external NAS. "Shared folders" in VM's properties won't work without VMware tools installed.
Both are possible, boot CD can be used too. It detects VMware Workstation network adapter - so you can use shared folders of the host or us hosts's connection to access external NAS. "Shared folders" in VM's properties won't work without VMware tools installed.
I just did a test of this; I was able (* with some difficulty - see below) to boot my VM in VMware Workstation to the CD drive, and launch the standalone Acronis Backup CD. However, it hung at 36% for no obvious reason. I could still 'click around' and change views (details, progress, history, etc tabs) and I could even double-click the job entry, and get the 'details' and 'log' tabs (log tab is not useful as it only ever seems to log the start of the job, but that's another issue!). The progress bar was stuck at 36% and it was a nice green (no user action requested). Task manager of the host showed VMware cranking away at around 40%. So that was kind of a bummer. Any ideas why the job would just 'hang' like that?
(*) booting to the Acronis CD ... How, using VMware, does one achieve the equivalent of - with a Dell computer at least - a press of F12 during boot to bring up boot options? I could not ever interrupt the boot. But I could boot to the BIOS, and change the boot order, putting CD ahead of HD, and that's how I worked around it ... But I'd love to know what the trick is to get the VM to offer me boot options. But this is not as important as the item in the preceding paragraph. Thanks!
1- unfortunately no.
2- It's possible to press 'Esc' to get to the boot menu, but if you press in more than once (and you have, like, half a second timeframe to press it or else it continues booting) it exist the boot menu. So vm->power->"power on to bios" and putting CD first in the boot order like you do seems to be the only reliable option.