TI 2017 Made my SSD not boot

Leo, if all that you have done, as I understand your post above is:

Boot from the Acronis 2017 USB WinPE Rescue Media and created a full disk & partitions backup image of your internal Samsung EVO SSD drive (to an external USB drive?), then shutdown and restarted your computer.

There should be absolutely no changes made to your computer caused by the above actions.

Did you make any changes to your UEFI BIOS Boot priority settings in order to get the computer to boot from the USB WinPE media?

If you did, did you make a note of what the original BIOS settings were in order to change these back to how they were?

If your EFI BIOS is not showing the Samsung EVO SSD drive then I cannot see how booting from the Acronis WinPE media could cause this to be.

Note: you should be selecting the option for Windows Boot Manager as the priority boot device in the EFI BIOS settings if this is shown.

I didn't make any bios changes.  I have since booted from the WinPE 10 Acrons boot USB flash drive and now the SSD comes up with an error saying it can't read sector 0 disk 1.  I couldn't get it by that error so I pulled the USB and hard powered the computer off.  Right now I am reinstalling Windows 7 from a DVD and after that I will try restoring the image I made to see if I can get everything back.

Update:

I was able to reinstall Windows 7 from a DVD on the Samsung SSD.  After that I discovered that the data drive I had (drive D, 3TB Seagate Baracuda), which I did not image is now bricked.  I can't see the drive at all with Disk Management when docked in a USB 3.0 USB HDD docking station with Windows 10 OS or with Disk Management when directly connected to SATA port in Windows Server 2008r2.  This is strange.  Up until I had imaged the C drive this was also working perfectly.

Leo, I am sorry to hear of the further woes in this topic for your data drive as well as the problems with the SSD.

I have to say that I have never encountered any other users reporting any such problems nor have I experienced any such problems myself in all the many years of using Acronis True Image, so I have no explanation for why you should be seeing this issue.

I would suggest opening a Support Case directly with Acronis Support to see if they can investigate this matter further and try to identify what has gone wrong here?

Leo,

You may want to send a Private Message to MVP Bobbo, he has a Gigabyte board that gives him fits like yours is and can probably help you figure it out. 

The drive does not show up as a boot device - does it show up in the bios at all?  If the bios won't even detect, reseat cables and try again.  I'd also suggest hard powering the machine (power button).  Then disconnect the AC power plug. Press power 3-4 times and hold for 20 seconds on the last one.  Then release and plug in AC power and boot into the bios - check the boot order and make sure the drive is identified and that it is set to "Windows boot manager" if it is a UEFI OS install, or the hard drive name if it was a legacy OS install.

what firmware do you have on the board?  I've had sketchy performance with my Gigabyte Z170X gaming 3 board at times not recognizing different drives - the bios seems to want to hold onto old boot records from time to time - like a usb flash drive that was bootable, but I wiped and rebuilt and has a new UUID now, but it still identifies it with the old one and how it used to boot.  

I also absolutely have to leave mine as "other OS" - which is the default and CSM enabled (also default).  If I change from other OS to Windows 8/10, that works (usually), but have never been able to successly switch back to "other os", as that is when I really notice other bios settings being ignored and drives not being detected by the bios correctly.  

I'm running bios firmware F21.  Every now and then, I have to completely reflash the bios firmware (same version) to truly get the bios to operate with default settings and detect all drives (even UsB drives) correctly.  So far, the bios reflash has always gotten me back on track - personally, this will be my last Gigabyte board (previous was Gigabyte too and had similar issuse - dual bios even failed my on the old one).  So, if you've tried all bios settings and it still won't boot (and have removed all external devices, verified the SSD is the first boot priority .... UEFI should say "windows manager" in the name - don't select the SSD instance as the boot priority if your OS is UEFI installed - that is a legacy boot option in the Gigabyte boards), a bios reflash will probably get you back to working and suggest you keep it around on these boards if you do any type of external booting (Acronis, Windows repair, other third party tools for backup or paritioning, etc). It isn't needed often, but I've had to do this more than I'd like to.

The motherboard is a Z97 chipset.  It is running bios F7 and has been for 1.5 years when I built the system.  The Samsung 850EVO SSD was the boot drive, the Segate ST3000DM001 was the data drive, D:.  Both had been running flawlessly for the entire time since the system was built.  I don't generally update bios in a system that is running without a problem unless installing new hardware becomes an issue.  I do watch the downloads for the MB and there is nothing significant for my current setup.  I have an I7-4790K processor and 16 gig ram.

Like I said the system had been running fine.  I decided, based on WannaCry etc., that it was time to image the system.  I had been running ATI 2015 but decided to upgrage to 2017 first.  With 2015 I had in the last 3 months tried to image a friends Dell laptop with a Linus Rescue USB but it would not find all the drives, hence my decision to upgrade.  I did some research in the forum and FAQs and saw remarks from Acronis that it is better to use the WinPE version of a Rescue Disk to pick up all the drives.  So after installing 2017 I created a Rescue USB thumb drive and selected the WinPE version.  It informed me that I did not have the Windows AIK or Windows ADK components.  So I clicked the Download link on ATI 2017's dialog.  It downloaded and installed version 10, I assume that is the Windows 10 version, latest version.  After it installed the components it then proceded to create the Rescue Disk.  Now having a Rescue disk I attached an external USB drive, media to create the image on, and verified that it was visible under Windows Explorer.  Then I inserted the Rescue Disk USB stick and booted.  Everything showed up fine. I selected the entire boot drive, Samsung EVO 850, and selected the external USB drive as the destination.  I set compression to maximum, with a 4790 it shouldn't really slow it down as the reduced file size would more than offset the compression cycles when writing to a USB drive.  The entire imaging process appeared to run perfectly.  I had checked the Shutdown the Computer box when finished.  After the computer shutdown I removed the USB Rescue stick and external USB drive and turned the computer on.  The computer stopped at a bios screen and informed me that a boot image was not found.  I restarted, power button, and entered bios and determined that the Samsung 850 EVO was visible and set to the 1st boot device.  It appeared that somehow the MBR, at a minimum, was trashed.  So I started researching on my laptop and decided to boot from a Windows 7 install DVD.  I could not recover the SSD.  So I decided to do a Windows 7 reinstall.  That worked and the SSD would now boot.  Then I discovered that the 3tb Seagate was not showing up.  ATI 2017 should NOT have touched it.  As I began investigating that the Segate would not show up in the Disk Management plug in.  The particular UFEI ?  bios was not good at showing me what drives were attached, it only shows on a boot sequence screen, not a computer information screen.  So I have a Windows Server 2008r2 box in a Thermaltake case that has 2 SATA docking stations in the top of the case, which I have used many times.  I shut the Server down, put the Seagate in one of the docking stations and booted the Server.  It showed the drive in Disk Management on the server however not in Explorer or anything else.  Data gone.  When I tried to create a useable image it would error out and say the disk had 0, zero, space.  I have since used my wife's computer to install the drive and it does not appear in the bios screen.  It appears that somehow ATI 2017 trashed something in the firmware on the Seagate drive.  I have since reloaded the system, on the Samsung 850, and all appears to be running fine.  I have also aquired another 3tb data drive and it is running fine also.

It mistifys me as to how an ATI WinPE rescue disk did this.  I have since changed my procedures.  I have 2017 installed on both my desktop and laptop.  Both have 2nd drives, hdd data drives.  I now do the boot drive backup from with ATI app and back up to the data drives.  Then I mount the USB drive and copy/move the .tib to the external drive.  I have created a ATI 2017 Linux rescue USB stick that I use to image my wife's computer.  That has worked fine also.

ATI didn't do that to your Seagate. I suspect it was going bad already, which is why you got the original error and the following: 

1.  an error saying it can't read sector 0 disk 1 (assuming Disk 0 is the Samsung boot disk)

ps

I wish I could follow and help more (doing this w/own business since DOS ;), but these guys are pretty good here, and WILL help you. So, good luck.

I'd have to agree that Acronis wouldn't trash the drive and it probably failed or something happened to it in the process. I am using a Gigabyte Z170X and came from a Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD3H.  These will be my last as the UD3H had a dual bios, both of which failed and led me to the Z170X as an upgrade since I wanted to stick with a familiar board.  The firmware on the UD3H was lacking and far and few between, but it's critical to have more current firmware with UEFI setups - especially to support newer OS technology and more current drives like PCIE NVME.  I'm assuming bios f20e is available for your board now as gigabyte made a move a few months ago to try and standardize the same version across all of their boards - might be useful, but since the z77x and z97 boards are pretty similar, I'd be careful with yours as mine barely made it 3 years before both the main and backup bios options both took a header.

The only time Acronis will wipe a drive is if it is selected as the destination, or if you pick the "add new disk" option in the main menu of the rescue media.  However, I think Gigabyte boards have a problem with disk changes and UEFI as I've had to reflash bios firmware (same version) to get it to properly detect a drive and boot - again, another reason why I won't be going Gigabyte in the future - can't be a coincidence that it happened on my old board and still happens at times on the new board from time to time.

For the can't read sector 0 error - sounds like a dirty drive, or possibly a failing one.  You can try "chkdsk /f /r" if you can attach it to a working Windows OS or from a Windows installer advanced command prompt.  You may also want to grab the trial of Hard disk sentinel - it's an awesome hard disk health monitor tool.  I ended up buying the pro version because it identifed a failing disk that was down to 30% life and had my family pictures on it.

As for rescue media - they essentially work the same - Linux rescue media and WinPE.  The default rescue media is Linux - it's open source and can be distributed fully built so that's why it's the default.  The WinPE cannot be distributed and is why we have to download the ADK to build it first.  WinPE does have advantages though as it can be customized with our own drivers and even other Windows portable apps.  If you do build WinPE rescue media (I would recommend it for any new modern systems, any systems running RAID, and/or any systems using PCIE NVME hard drives), try out the MVP WinPE rescue media builder tool - Advanced 11.1 is the current version.  It's very easy to use and automatically adds the most common drivers for RAID and NVME drives, plus you get a web browser, file explorer(s), and other nice features to make it a more well-rounded tool for doing other stuff with too.