Boot failure after normal Acronis backup
Last night I set up a new backup, not the first, but incremental. The backup media is an external hdd.
Is it likely to be coincidence, that my Dell XPS will not start windows the morning after I did a backup with a selection to
1) ignore badsectors
2) shut down computer after backup
3) verify backup.
The next morning, the computer had been turned off, so I assumed the backup and verify had completed; but then the computer would not boot up at all. I can get into the BIOS: the error message is always just on boot, "cannot find boot media". It worked fine last night!
I do not have a boot-disk handy (there is one, but it is in another locaction, not accessible now..) so cannot easily see what has gone wrong, but there are several backups on that external hard drive.
Can i find online a bootable Acronis file to download to the external hdd itself, or to a USB stick?
Presumably if I can get the computer to boot into Acronis, then I can restore from backup..
i have disconnected the external drive..(that is to say, just taken it out of the USB port..)
i also have my account registered for the pc that will not boot, and I can access from a laptop my account and see in downloads "bootable media" - but this is an ISO file; not sure what that is, but I think it is something I have ot burn to a CD, and THAT is something I do not have with me! What I do have are USB sticks, and the external Hard drive (with the backups on), and a spare external hard drive.
Grahame, if all you have done is make a backup using Acronis True Image, then there is no way that this would cause your computer to not boot afterwards. A backup is a passive action that does not cause any changes to be made to the source computer - the only write activity is to the destination backup drive where the backup image is being stored.
The .ISO file in your Acronis Account downloads area is for the Linux version of the Rescue Media which would need to be burnt to a CD or DVD blank media, or else written to a USB stick using a program such as Rufus or ISOtoUSB to convert the content into a bootable format on the USB media.
I would not recommend attempting to restore the backup at this point until you are totally sure that there is an actual problem with the Windows OS.
In my acronis account , I see it calls my version "Acronis True Image Advanced"..which I have interpreted as being True Image 2017..it was a 2 year subscription from Nov 2016 ending this November.
Grahame, if you have a subscription product then you can open a Support Case directly with Acronis if you wish to do so.
See KB 6031: List of support options for Acronis products which shows that the Advanced version of ATI is the 2018 one - not 2017 which used the term Premium.
OK, thanks, I am trying again (4th time..) with nothin gplugged in to any USB ports, and will report the messages. First comes a blank screen with DELL in the middle. This displays for several minutes (unusually - normally it flashes up for a few seconds)
then a black screen, white writing "Windows failed to start. Insert windows install disk and choose "repair yoru computer" etc.
Status OXC00000000F The boot selection failed.
From here, I can get to the bios software, and see the boot order of devices is
Windows Boot Manager
USB storege device
Internal HDD
USB floppy
bit stuck, now, what to do next.
it is not impossible my hard drive really has gone suddenly and critically bad..last backup before one, I did get a stop because of a bad sectore, then I ran chkdsk c: /f and it showed 8 bad sectors (of the 500gb hdd) and the net back up worked when i chose to ignore bad sectors.
If it has, then presumably I can buy a new internal hdd, and put it in, but then I still need somehow to get into the restore mode to put everything back, or will that not work? I have never "cloned" by hdd.
Grahame, if you have been seeing bad sectors then it is possible that the drive has failed or that the ability to boot into Windows is impacted by the same issue.
If you have another computer which has Acronis True Image installed, then you should be able to connect your external backup HDD and check that your recent backup image(s) can be opened using Windows Explorer (double-click on the .TIB file) and can be Validated.
It is never a good idea to 'ignore bad sectors' as these can be anywhere on the disk drive.
I would recommend downloading the Acronis Rescue .ISO file from your Account and getting this burnt to CD then try booting the problem computer from the CD.
Please note that as you have Windows Boot Manager as the first boot device in the BIOS settings, this indicates that you have a UEFI computer, and therefore you need to also boot the Rescue CD in UEFI mode.
See KB 59877: Acronis True Image 2017: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media which shows what to look for when booting the media.
See KB 60131: Acronis True Image 2018: how to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media which shows the process for recovering your backup image to a new HDD which are the same once you are booted to the offline Acronis application from CD.
thanks, the trouble I now have is that my spare laptop does not have a cd ..is there an option to download software to make a usb stick bootable? or I will run around and find a cd.
(the reason I ignored the bad sectors, is I imagined that the chkdsk c: /r that I ran successfully a few days before would have repaired them, or isolated them..)
On your advice, I think for safety I will restore to a new hard drive. I can see how to do that..but if I simultaneously decide to upgrade my pc to an SSD drive, perhaps that will create trouble because it will be dis-similar hardware?
Perhaps you would recommend me just to replace what I had before, and leave the SSD for another day?
Grahame, you can use Rufus or ISOtoUSB among other free programs to convert an ISO image to create a bootable USB stick.
See webpage: How to Create Bootable USB Drives and SD Cards For Every Operating System for some other suggestions.
Note: the USB stick should be formatted as FAT32 and be no larger than 32GB maximum.
See KB 58108: Acronis products: using USB sticks with more than 32GB capacity
When using CHKDSK with bad sectors, you should use /B which will check all sectors and attempt to reallocate any data from them, but this will take a long time depending on the size of the drive being checked.
There shouldn't be an issue with moving to a new SSD rather than another HDD drive provided that your data from the source drive will fit on the new drive. There is no issue with dissimilar hardware as that only applies to change of motherboard, CPU etc, not to drives.
thanks, in case anyone else is interested -
1) Steve' suggestion to download the ISO file and use ISOtoUSB worked for me to create a useable boot USB drive.
2) The method within Acronis to make a bootable USB stck did not work for me..(probably my USB stck was too big)
3) those who do not know better, may wish to use a very small memory USB stick..mine was 32Gb and took 4 hours to reformat to FAT32, with a single partition..which is what it required. In the end, the burnt ISO files on the USB drive only took up less than a 1GB, so a very small USB stick might have been better!
Thanks Steve for your help. bye
Grahame, thanks for the update / feedback, glad you have got a working USB stick made.