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Needed: Hints on how to backup and recover a Dell T3610 with UEFI Boot Drive (WinPE with Acronis 2017 won't boot)

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I have a brand new Dell T3610 working with the following configuration:

Win7-64 UEFI

Based on what I see drive in drive management C: Boot is set up with UEFI and GPT

The boot drive is connected directly to the motherboard as SATA3 HDD0

The BIOS setup is configured to Boot the C: drive as UEFI drive.

The other BIOS settings have to be set to RAID (even though the boot drive is a single drive not on a RAID) or the system will not boot.

There are 2 additional HDD, two 5TB data drives setup on a separate PCIe LSI hardware RAID controller set up in a RAID 1 mirror configuration. The 5TB is set up as 5 logical 1TB drives. I don't believe that these drives should cause any issues in trying to image the separate 1TB C: Boot drive.

I bought Acronis 2017 to image and restore this system and I can make a tib backup of the hard drive but I can not figure out how do a restore. I have used

Acronis in years past without a hitch but this one has me stumped. I folowed the instructions of how to make a bootable WinPE with Acronis 2017 and burned the disk, it attempts to boot and I can see activity on the CD/DVD ROM drive LED but it never completes the boot. I took the CD to another system and it boots fine. I have used this drive to burn and view CD's and DVD's and I have done a one time boot to boot it but no help there. 

When I do the one time boot from the CD for some reason it messes with my BIOS settings and I have to go back in and reset them so that the system boots from the UEFI drive. If I try and set the SATA to SATA or AHCI mode from RAID the system will not boot the operating system.

I am at a loss here. All I am trying to do is image the C HDD Boot drive and prove that I can recover the system. I have a bare 1TB drive that is identical to

the boot drive in the system for testing. I did try a legacy boot with the standard linux based Acronis 2017 disk but when I point to the .tib file Acronis

tells me that if I restore from this image the restored image will not boot. Also after booting a legacy one time boot I had to manually go back and reset the BIOS settings.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Sam

Loyal Acronis user since probably 2005

 

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RAID is the issue - even though it's just the one drive. The default Linux media does not have the necessary RAID controller drivers for these newer systems.  You need the IRST drivers to detect the drive when the SATA mode is set to RAID, so WinPE would be the way to go.  However, you do have 2 options since this is just a one drive setup.

Option 1 - temporarily change the bios to AHCI (just for booting ACronis to detect the drive).  Boot straight to the Linux rescue media after configuring the SATA mode (tempoarily) to AHCI.  Backup or restore (drive should be detected now).  Power off and then return the SATA mode to RAID before booting back to the OS.

Option 2 (Better) - create WinPE rescue media.  You will need to download and install the Windows 10 ADK (1511 or 1607 - either is fine, I personally recommend sticking with 1511 for now).  Once installed, build WinPE with the MVP WinPE builder tool - this will automatically inject the IRST drivers for you and keep things simple.    

Links for the ADK from Microsoft and the WinPE MVP tool are just below (get the advanced version - it's much nicer, but just as easy to use for the media creation build).