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All Partitions don't show for backing up to

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I am running Home 2010 latest build. I'm having major problems with Win 7 and am unable to boot. I want to backup the partition where Win 7 is and reinstall, letting the installation create the system partition, then I will recover my image backup and hope that works. I am getting an error where it says there's no system partition and the winre is trying to fix it to no avail. Maybe someone has some suggestions on resolving this another way. In the meantime....

All of the Partitions show on the What to Backup, but only the partition I'm backing up and my USB external drives show where I can place the backup.
I made sure that I have a partition with more than adequate space available. It's also wierd that it would show me the drive that I'm taking an image from as available to place the backup.

I've never had this happen before. Can someone enlighten me as to why this is and how I can resolve it?

In the meantime, I have another computer licensed for Acronis with a previous version, I'm going to put that on CD and try that version. NOTE: Previous version did not resolve this issue.

Thanks for any and all help.

Jan

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Jan:

Are the partitions that you are trying to save your backup to formatted as NTFS or FAT32?

Have you checked them for errors by running chkdsk /f X:, where X: is the drive letter of the partition? Try running chkdsk from a command prompt while booted from the Win 7 DVD.

You can indeed save an image file to the partition that is being backed up because Acronis uses snapshot technology. The resultant image will contain the contents of the partition at the instant that the backup is started, and therefore will not contain a copy of the image file. However, you cannot restore an image located on a partition to that very same partition because the first step in image restoration is to delete and re-create the partition.

For your original problem, try running the automatic Win 7 repair more than once; it only fixes one problem at a time. You may get lucky.

All of my drives are NTFS. I can see all of the drives at the What to backup stage and in Winre and partitioning tools and at the command prompt in Winre. All non-USB disks are recognized and no errors found using chkdsk.

Jan:

That's very strange. The usual cause of the problem that you're seeing is that there are file system errors on the partition being backed up, so TrueImage reverts to sector-by-sector mode while backing up. The size required for a sector-by-sector backup is equal to the size of the partition being backed up (not just the used space, but all space in the partition). Such a large image file may not then fit on other partitions.

Since you said that you have checked for errors and have found none, then I'm not sure what's going on. Are you creating the backup in normal mode with normal compression and not in sector-by-sector mode? Can you save your backup to one of the external USB disks and later restore from the USB disk? I know that doesn't resolve your question but it may be an expedient workaround.

All I wanted to do was Image C and store the backup on one of my other SATA drives, but all it shows me is my USB drives. So what I did was add a partition to the drive WIN 7 is on and I am storing the backup to the 2nd partition.

This has been a very strange experience for me, going to 7 that is. Nothing has worked out right. I think it's a crappy OS and I'm disappointed that in order to utilize more memory I have to deal with such crap.

Oh well... Sorry for the rant. But I don't understand at all what Acronis is doing. I did NOT try to change from AHCI to IDE and see if that resolved the problem though.

Thanks Mark.

Jan:

Sorry that you're having problems with Windows 7. I've been running it since February 2009 and it's been really great; certainly the best version of Windows yet. Give it a chance and eventually you won't be disappointed.

I had missed earlier that your partitions targeted for storage were on different disks. Are you saying that the disks are visible in Windows but not in the Acronis recovery environment? If so, then it's a driver issue. Changing your BIOS settings for the disks to IDE compatibility mode may solve this issue. Alternatively, log into your account on the Acronis web site and try downloading the latest ISO image of the Bootable Media for TI 2010; it may contain drivers that are not in the version that you create with Bootable Media Builder.

Finally, if you describe the problems you are having with getting Windows 7 to boot then one of us may be able to help you manually copy the needed boot files and fix the BCD so that your PC boots correctly. Just post details and we'll try to help.

I had similar problems with TI-11 where the boot disk could not find SATA drives. This occurred on 64bit systems with both WinXP 32 and Win7 64 bit OS. Problem was resolved by requesting a Linux-based boot recovery iso from Acronis.
After upgrading to TI-2010, the SATA drives again could not be found. Using the Bootable Media Builder from the Plus Pack, I was able to create a WinPE bootable iso that solved the problem. This was the only method that worked for me.

Mark, I tried everything to get 7 started up, rebuilding the bcd, the mbr, changing to IDE, and well I can't remember everything I tried. I finally gave up, unhooked all of my drives but 1 (I get the windows message that says basically: I can't install windows 7 on this drive - and it's for every drive), so I can only get it to install if I only have 1 drive. After installation, I could F11 to Acronis and restore a backup that was from a day before I crashed.

I don't know why I'm having so many issues with 7 but I'm using 64 bit - initially I used Laplink to carry over my files so I didn't have to somehow find all of my software, but that didn't turn out so good. I had security issues, basically even though I was an administrator it didn't act like I was. So I gave up and did a Custom install on another drive. Now I have constant reboots that I don't know what is causing them and I can't find any clues (maybe I don't know where to look). 7 can't deal with my ATI Radeon card - the card is new as of a few months ago when I built my i7, and the driver came out in June. I'm pretty experienced in the OS's and resolving the issues, but I don't get the issues I'm having with 7. I thinking now of going to XP 64-bit. I need to utilize more than 3 gig memory.

As far as Acronis - I keep the latest build that I have installed on CD, and I have the latest build. What is wierd is that I can see all of the drives when I'm picking what I'm going to backup, it's the destination where it doesn't show all of my drives.

If I'm able to use F11 to get there all of my drives are shown in both what to backup and destination.

Charles: is the BartPE the same thing?

I better save this before my PC reboots again.

Thanks guys.

WinPE is different from BartPE. They are similar in that they are Windows 32 bit API core based, with BartPE being XP based and is not provided by Microsoft, while WinPE is Vista based and is provided by Microsoft. Driver support is better for WinPE than for BartPE, since it more recent. BartPE builds you have to do yourself. WinPE builds are supported by Plus Pack capability. Here is a tutorial on making a WinPE build: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/9449

Jan:

Have you tried some of the automated troubleshooting tools available in Windows 7? From the START menu, type "Performance" and select "Performance Information and Tools" from the list of search hits. Then select "Advanced tools". The first few lines on the resultant dialog may contain issues that Windows has detected. Try running a System Health Report. Searching the Event logs may provide further clues.

Mark I wanted to let you know that my problems with 7 weren't with 7. I had to sets of 3 gig memory - the same corsiar sets. One set has a problem - I don't know what the problem is since Windows Mem Diag showed no problems, but there's a problem with it.

I still have many event errors to resolve, but I finally have the stability I was looking for once I removed the bad memory.

Thanks for the help you provided.

By the way, I never figured out what the issue is with the software running from the CD not showing all of the drives. At some point it started working again, but I can't remember what may have resolved it.

Jan:

The problem with the Linux boot environment on the CD may also be memory-related. I'm not sure if the Linux kernel used by Acronis can handle 6 GB of RAM, so it wouldn't surprise me if it started working correctly when you removed a module and dropped back to 3 GB of RAM.

When you get a replacement module and have 6 GB of RAM you may see the problem again. If so, try limiting the amount of RAM seen by the recovery environment to 2 GB by passing the following Linux kernel startup parameter when booting from the CD (see page 29 of the TI 2010 user guide for an example of how to do this for changing the video mode):

mem=2038M

I'm glad that you found the root cause of the problem and hope that you enjoy Windows 7.