[FIXED] ATIH 2017 recovery won't create a bootable medium on an USB 3.0 stick

Hi Karl,

I just ran into this with WinPESE10.  It actually turned out to be my thumb drive.  No matter what I did, I could not get any bootable media to open in Legacy mode from this disk.  I had anoter one that was working so I imaged it and deployed the image to the "bad" USB stick and now I can use UEFI or LegacDy on it. Prior to that, I had formatted with diskpart, disk manager and even mini tool partition wizard with no luck.  This leads me to believe the formatting of the flash drive was the issue (all Sandisk ultra flairs) and restoring the full disk image of another working usb flash drive fixed it.  I imagine that if i had done a full format (not just a quick one) with mini tool parition wizard, that would have done the trick too.  Perhaps try that first to test and if not, see if you have another working flash drive and image it and deploy that image.  Then rebuild in Acronis.

I concur with Bobbo here.  I always full format thumb drives prior to re-use to create boot media because of this very problem.  Performing a full format seems to correct the problem, at least that has been my experience.

Thanks guys for your offered help. I have to say that this (full format) was never necessary before. This is really strange.

Yeah, I am not sure what the difference is but I began to notice this with the 2016 release. 

Hello Karl, Bobbo, Enchantech,

What are the settings for disk formatting that you`ve used? We would like to check if the issue reproduces on our side as well.

If possible, could you please try preparing the thumb drive in diskpart before putting Acronis on it?

diskpart

select disk X

clean

create partition primary

active

format fs=fat32 quick

assign

exit

Thank you in advance!

Regards,

Slava

Hi Slava,

It is easy enough to reproduce.  For me it is taking an existing thumb drive that already has been used for creating Acroins Recovery Media.  I now want to create new media on this same thumb drive for a new version of True Image.  If I quick formaat the drive using Windows disk format Use the Media Builder tool to create the new media on the drive.  True Image will report success however, when boot attempt is performed on machine with UEFI enabled the thumb drive is not detected.  

I think this might be an issue with UEFI itself.  I recently created a Windows 10 Pro X64 installation thumb drive on a USB 2.0 drive.  I had UEFI/Legacy boot enabled in my bios as it supports that.  When I booted into the bios to select this install disk the only entry for it I found was for a Legacy boot.  No UEFI device appeared in the list.  I changed boot order to Windows Boot Manager, saved and exited the bios.  Once back in Windows I checked the thumb drive for efi boot folder and found it there as it should be.  Next I shutdown the machine then, started the machine again back into the bios and I now had a UEFI thumb drive boot entry to choose in the bios list.

So at this point I am from now on going to shutdown my machines. attach the boot drive, start the machine booting into the bios to see if that procedure will at some point reproduce the issue.  So far it has not.

I can concur with Enchantech. I am using Windows Formatting GUI and took care to format it with standard settings applied because now and then Windows 10 might choose NTFS as default but if you dedicately click on use standard settings it will do the job just as your diskpart usage.

I have tried the same procedure with the same stick today and now it boots on all of my computers.

I have found some other issues if with an Asus P8H77-I Bios 1102, that will not boot from a Acronis Linux Recovery from a created DVD-RW, using the same disc and usb 2.0 dvd drive on a P8Z77-I WD works.

So at the moment I can basically repro the DVD-RW issue but not the usb stick issue anymore.

I only have 3 UEFI machines to test with, but none of them will recognize a UEFI-based USB bootable flash drive that is plugged in while the machine is running, then rebooted. The machine has to be shut down, then powered on with the flash drive attached in order to see the device in the UEFI boot list. I think this is a property of the UEFI firmware, at least on these 3 machines (two Dell XPS desktops and a Microsoft Surface 3). Note that this is ANY UEFI bootable flash drive; I have not tested with Acronis bootable media.

"I have not tested with Acronis bootable media. "

Hi Mark, nice to meet you haven't read from you yet. Could you be bothered to test this with the ATIH 2017 bootable (Linux)?

" but none of them will recognize a UEFI-based USB bootable flash drive that is plugged in while the machine is running, then rebooted. "

I fear this by design, as I have the same behaviour on all of my Asus Mainboards. The USB stick is not present or the UEFI firmware if you do a warm restart of a computer. It will be initialized only at cold boot. This does not affect that UEFI does see the stick if you want to flash firmware for example but mostly this is an additional program doing that.

So basically if you choose restart Windows 10 while holding down shift key you will get into the boot menu of Win 10 but you will not see any USB bootable devices (DVD or USB). They will be only present at cold reboot either so same as the UEFI firmware. Assumingly Win 10 share the same boot device list that you get when you press F8 after UEFI initialization (Asus UEFI boot menu)

So at this point I am from now on going to shutdown my machines. attach the boot drive, start the machine booting into the bios to see if that procedure will at some point reproduce the issue.  So far it has not.

@Enchantech @Slava, if I can remember correctly the device will not be shown in the boot devices list, while it is visible to be attached in the UEFI firmware.

Strange enough the issue is gone for me, I won't bet a dime that Windows 10 accidently formatted the stick with NTFS meanwhile.

Suggestion:
I think we can concur that it would be the best if ATIH 2017 would offer an optional and proper formatting of the USB drive prior putting the Acronis Recovery files onto it. Then, the user can be sure that the USB drive will be formatted correctly. It should not be a lot work to implement this feature.

Should I open a seperate suggestion thread or is it ok for you to pass this on to the your collegues @Slava?

I did some testing on an Asus motherboard. Here's a little bit about how the BIOS is configured:

Boot/CSM   ---   Enabled

Boot/CSM/Boot Device Control   ---   UEFI and Legacy OpROM

Boot/CSM/Boot from Storage Devices   ---   Both, UEFI first

Boot/Secure Boot   ---   Windows UEFI  (This means Secure Boot is enabled.)

Advanced/USB Configuration/Legacy USB 2.0 Support   ---   Enabled

Advanced/USB Configuration/Legacy USB 3.0 Support   ---   Enabled

I used a USB 3.0 stick that had been formatted FAT32 for use with WinPE. I deleted enerything except System Volume Information from the stick. I then created the Linux recovery media on the stick.

If I reboot and use the F8 key to enter the override boot menu, I can boot the stick in either Legacy or UEFI mode. It makes no difference when the stick is inserted. It makes no difference if the computer is shut down first of rebooted from Windows 10.

Here's where it gets interesting. It does make a difference when the stick is inserted if I reboot by holding down the shift key in Windows 10. If I shut down and insert the stick and boot into Windows 10, rebooting by holding down the shift key brings up the boot options. I see the option to use USB/DVD devices. When I select it, I have two options (Hard Drive or UEFI USB 3.0). If I select the Hard Drive option, it boots TI in Legacy mode. If I select The UEFI USB 3.0 option, it boots into the Acronis UEFI menu and then into TI when I select it. If the USB stick is inserted while I am in Windows 10, the result is different. If I reboot holding down the shift key, I see the same option to use USB/DVD devices. When I select that option, I only see the option to select Hard Drive. The UEFI USB 3.0 option is not present. When I select Hard Drive, it boots into the Acronis Linux media in Legacy mode.

Then I changed the BIOS to disable Secure Boot:

Boot/Secure Boot   ---   Other OSs  (This means Secure Boot is disabled.)

Disabling Secure Boot made no difference. All the above results were the same.

I can say that on my Gigabyte Z170X board, I have all kinds of trouble booting UsB sticks in UEFI mode.  Unlike my Dell where I can pull a UsB drive or add one during a warm boot and it will sort things out, if I make any changes to attached drives on my Gigabyte board, it will not boot properly unless I reset the bios to defaults - which resets the boot order.  This is a real pain and I've had to learn to adjust the habits I'm used to as a result.  Ultimately, I have to do a complete shutdown, plug in the drive and let it do it's thing in the bios and then I can use it.  However, before removing it, I must boot into Windows completely first or the bios will flip out.  This is something i loathe about my gigabyte board and has caused me a lot of trouble with recovery and cloning too.  I can repeat this behavior with any bootable media... Acronis Linux, Acronis PE (any version), other backup products, other partitioning products, etc.  Mobo manufacturers need to get a better handle on UEFI and make the behavior more universal... settings that work on one type of board, may have different hiccups or inconsistencies on another board depending on how the firmware is written to behave. 

So for now, I have gotten used to doing full formats with USB flash drives using 3rd party tools like Minitool Partition Wizard before creating bootable mioedia.  I am also sure to only plug in bootable media after a full shutdown (cold boot) and not to remove it until Windows has booted as this seems to be the tigger needed for my  for my particular motherboard (Gigabyte Gaming 3 Z170X v 1.0).  

In your position I would open a case at Gigabyte complaining about the loosy UEFI support. Guess that your firmware is already up to date.

I have plenty other issues with Asus too, just to remember the wrong display (still) where there is a missing CR when the UR is included, or still some exceptions when loading the Linux bootloader. All these issues are reported to Acronis and so far I guess known, but still specific to Asus as it seems.

@Mustang many thanks!

Yeah, I think this will by my last Gigabyte board.  I had similar issues with my old one Z97 Gigabyte board and thought I fried the bios when I added an NVME drive, but knowing what I do with this Z170X board, it seems to be similar behavior.  Overall, it functions great and performs will, but firmware revisions are far and few.  I was on a Beta firmware that never standdardized with the old board and on the same with the new one to fix other issues. There are already newer Gigabyte model revisions and it seems like they just don't do a lot of firmware updates.  In a couple of years, when I upgrade again, I'll be looking at ASROCK as an alternative due to goofy issue with MSI and ASUS too. Just personal preference though. 

Yes this is really odd, Gigabyte - along some other vendors (TP-Link, D-Link, Asrock, Biostar etc) do regularly release new "revisions" of their mainboards instead of supporting the existing hardware in order to fix issues (either UEFI / BIOS related) or technical related in other ways.

This is really a bad manner but has become pretty common. Despite my controversies I had with Asus support I am still happy they are not going the same path yet.