Skip to main content

Help with creating cloning bootable media

Thread needs solution

Mustang wrote:

Have you tried booting the USB 2.0 drive from a USB 2.0 port? The 4 USB ports on the back panel outlined in blue are the 3.0/2.0 ports. The other two ports (not outlined in blue) are the 2.0/1.1 ports. Try the 2.0 USB drive in one of the ports not outlined in blue. Try it with both 32 and 64 bit WinPE.

SOME PROGRESS. I was previously using the front/top USB 2&3 ports (which had all worked with UEFI booting). I switched to the rear USB 2.0 ports as per your suggestion, and booted legacy off the Windows ADK image with a 16GB USB2 stick. I then tried my 32GB USB3 stick which has the 64 bit Acronis RM, that failed.

I will redo the RM onto the 16GB 2.0 stick and see how it goes.

 

Well a legacy Restore was finally successful, the restore to the bigger 512GB worked but I still have the same small amount of space left, and a huge unpartitioned space. Did I select the wrong option in Acronis or do I need to extend the new partition somehow? Will wait for advice on this before potentially making a mess lol.

 

Good to hear. I recommend you download a free partition magager called MiniTool Partition Wizard to resize your system to fill the unallocated space. You can move any small partition to make all the unallocated space following the C: partition and then resize C: to fill the space. It's very easy.

acronz,

First of all let me welcome you to the Forum.

I have been following this thread for awhile now and see that you are having issue with booting your ASUS Z97 board using the WinPE media which you created using the MVP WinPE builder tool.

I want to point out here that I have tested this on my test system that uses an ASUS Z97 Deluxe board and can boot the board in Legacy mode but it is necessary that you setup the board bios correctly to do so.  It may also be necessary that you shutdown your machine and start it cold in order to get things working.  This all has to do with the ASUS UEFI bios and has nothing to do with Acronis True Image, WinPE, or the default Linux based media which can be built using the Media Builder within the True Image Windows application.  These early UEFI boards are finicky to boot and unfortunately it is up to the user to learn how to boot each board and the methods to do so will vary from board to board and bios revision to bios revision.  By the way I am running bios revision 2801 on my test machine board just like you as well.

Now, if you have been attempting to use the F8 key one time boot option to boot this board from the WinPE boot media stop trying!  It will not boot that way.  There is some problem in doing that with this particular board/bios.  It never works for me period.

Here is what i believe will work for you:

Boot/Start the machine from a complete power off shutdown.  While booting tap the DEL key repeatedly until the bios configuration screen appears.  Make certain the the WinPE media you created is attached/connected to the machine prior to booting

Switch the view of the bios configuration screen to Advanced mode by selecting the F7 key.  A new view will open and you should be looking at the Main configuration screen as is determined by looking at the highlighted screen tabs at the top of the screen (Main should be highlighted)

Use your right arrow key to tab over to the Boot configuration screen.  Now use the down arrow key to select the CSM (Compatibility Support Module) and press the Enter key

From this screen select Launch CSM to Enabled.

Select Boot Device Control to UEFI and Legacy OPROM

Select Boot from Network Devices to Ignore

Select Boot from Storage Devices to Both, Legacy OPROM First

Select Boot from PCI-E/PCI Expansion Devices to UEFI driver first 

Press the ESC key to go back to the Boot configuration page.

 

Use the down arrow key again to select Boot Option #1 then enter key to expand the list. 

In the resulting list you need to find the entry that displays the name of your WinPE media.  You should see the media listed twice.  One of the listings will have "(UEFI)" in front of the name, the other should not have the "UEFI" in the name.  Use the down arrow key to select the entry WITHOUT "UEFI" in the name.  Press Enter.  Your selection should now appear in the Boot Option #1 field box.

Use the right arrow key to select Exit then the down arrow key to select Save Changes & Reset.  Press Enter.  You will see a confirmation screen, select OK.

Your machine should now reboot to a black screen with a blinking cursor top left of screen.  Be patient as this screen will display for some time.  Eventually you will see the Windows Logo and the spinning circle on screen.  WinPE boot will follow shortly after that and the True Image application will open shortly thereafter.

 

If you do not see any entry in the Boot Option #1 field without the UEFI in the name of your WinPE media my suggestion to you is that you build the media again with the MVP tool.  This time when you do select to build 32 bit WinPE with nothing else added and try again.

If you still do not see an entry for your WinPE without UEFI in the name then I suggest that you shutdown the machine (power off).  disconnect all hard drives except the source drive (drive where backup image is located) and the target drive (drive that you wish to restore the image to) and try again.

When you are successful in booting the machine to the WinPE media and performing the recovery of your image is complete shutdown the computer using the RED Shutdown button at bottom left of screen.  Once machine shutsdown remove the WinPE media from the machine and disconnect the source disk (drive where backup image is located).  Start the machine and again press repeatedly the DEL key to enter the bios.  Go back to the Boot Option #1 and change the option to disk that you recovered your image to which should be the only hard drive in the list at this point.  After that select Exit - Save Changes and Reset, select OK on confirmation screen.  Your machine should now boot into Windows in Legacy mode.

Acronz,

Just to validate - your image booted fine in legacy on My Dell E-series laptop using a Sandisk Ultra Flair 16Gb USB 3.0 drive on a USB 3.0 port.  It looks like it was created with the 5.9 basic version as it only has the basic Acronis Interface and the old MVP logo (which is fine).  **EDIT - I also note that you have 8041 - there's a more current 8053 version you can install.  For the rescue media, not a big change here, but it's available to address other bug fixes in the main application.

Glad that using the other flash drive on a USB 2.0 port did the trick.  Now that you know what works, you can give the advanced build a try - it's just as easy to use/build.  It's only advanced because of the additional features it adds - I think you'll like it a lot better when you see what it has compared to the basic rescue media.

I also believe Enchantech's method would work as well for.  It's a shame that one would need to go into the bios and change the boot order each time though on newer motherboards like this as a work-a-round though.   That said, my Gigabyte board has it's own qwerks.  I have a one time boot menu (F12) which works great.  I also have a boot override menu in the main bios/advanced option where I should be able to boot drives from, that one NEVER works for me with external drives.  The F12 one time boot and Enachntec's method always work on this board though.  

UEFI has a lot of advantages, but man, it needs a coalition to standardize it so we don't have to jump through these different hoops to figure out which methods work on each individual UEFI firmware verision and vendor board.

 

All done yay! I got minipartition wizard and resized the partition. I will run a full chkdsk before wiping the old drive. Btw the old drive will mainly be used for imagery/video, when formatting is it ok to increase the cluster size to say 8K instead of default 4K on an SSD?

Thanks for all your help guys :)

 

Woo-hoo!  Now you know what it takes on your hardware so hopefully it will be smooth sailing in the future.  Curious, but did you select "manual" or "automatic" when you did the restore?  I've always done "automatic" and it has automatically extended the rest of the drive out to use the full amount when moving to a larger drive.  Those that use manual, usually end up with the same size as the old one... some can just use Windows Disk Manager and extend the C: drive out, but others sometimes have to use the third party tools.  

I really like Minitool for partitioning and keep it in my toolbag as my go-to parition software.  The free version is plenty good for most people.  I ended up buying it because they dropped the abiltiy to create rescue media in Version 10 of the free offering.  There are a couple of instances, where I'll only mess with the main OS drive from an offline state because of the required reboot in the process when running the application from Windows and that scares me a little bit since we run into these bootability issues with different UEFI motherboards and firmware versions. Minitool has been rock solid though and has never let me down (at least, so far).

Increasing the cluster size to 8k will not be of any advantage.  What you can do is use the MiniTool software to align the partition on the drive.  If the partition is not aligned it can adversely effect performance.