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Acronis 2019 Survival kit creation and usage

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Hi - I am attempting to create a survival kit on a 7TB external hard drive and can't boot from it to restore the created backups. Is there a size limitation for the external hard drive wrt creating the Acronis survival kit? Thanks.

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Rick, have you actually made the Survival Kit on this 7TB drive here?  How does the rescue media partition show in Windows Disk Management?  It should be shown as a FAT32 2GB partition at the start of the drive and show as Active.

I am not aware of any size limitation but do not have any drives of that size myself to test with.

Steve - Yes, it shows in Disk Management at the beginning of the drive as ACRONIS HM 2GB FAT32.partition. I have an ASROCK UEFI BIOS. I can plug in a 1TB external hard drive that has the survival kit on it that I created on another one of my machines. I can then select it from the boot list that comes up after pressing F11 when rebooting and it will boot into ATI 2019 just fine. Thanks for your help. 

Rick,

How long did you wait for the disk to boot?  It might take awhile to boot given the size of the drive in use.

Enchantech - Waited until it rebooted on its own and tried all UEFI options and USB option for the external drive. I'm a very patient person. Have raised two kids and currently have three grandkids.

Enchantech - Also, I own and operate my own HVAC  business. Have any issues, just let me know. That goes for you too Steve.

Rick,

Another couple of question, how long would you estimate it was before the reboot occurred?

I assume that the reboot took you back to Windows?

Enchantec - Yes, that is correct, the reboot takes me back to Windows. I would estimate that it takes approximately 30 seconds for it to boot back to Windows. Just today I created a 1TB NTFS partition that I then created the Survival Kit on, but, that didn't work either. It also rebooted back to Windows. The reason I created a 1TB partition is that the 1TB external hard drives that I created the Survival Kit on work perfectly, so, I thought perhaps this drive was too big, but it seems it didn't make a difference.

Thanks for your help.

Rick,

Interesting. 

If I can impose on you a bit more here I would appreciate it.

Below you will see a screenshot of a command prompt window in which I used Windows diskpart.  I would like to see if you get the same result as shown in the screenshot from a partition list run on the Survival Kit drive(s) you have created.

The commands are simple.  You will need to run them from an Admin command prompt.  You can open an admin command prompt from Windows search.  Type Command in the search, when Command Prompt appears right click on it and select Run as administrator.  After the command prompt window opens you can start the diskpart utility by typing at the command prompt:

  • diskpart

In my screenshot please note that the first command for the diskpart utility to run is:

  • list disk

This will show all of your connected hard disks.  From the list of disks you will need to know which disk is your Survival Kit disk.  In my case it is disk 5.  I know this from checking in Disk Management to verify that Disk 5 is the correct disk number.

The next command to run is:

  • Select disk #  - where # is the desired target disk number, in the screenshot this is 5

With the correct disk selected as diskpart shows it is now possible to display all partitions on the selected disk.

The next command to run is:

  • list partition

As you can see in the screenshot the disk has 3 partitions, a Reserved, a 2048 MB Primary, and a 230 GB Primary.  So my question is, do you get this same 3 partition result?

After you complete the above you can quit the disk part utility by typing:

  • exit

You may now close the command prompt window.

Looking forward to your reply :)

 

 

Survival Kit diskpart_partition_list.png

Rick wrote:

….. Just today I created a 1TB NTFS partition that I then created the Survival Kit on, but, that didn't work either. It also rebooted back to Windows. 

It is my understanding that the partition on which survival kit is installed has to be FAT32 - it has been on the ones I have created.

Ian

Rick

The answer is simple.  Windows 10 has a built in utility to convert a MBR disk to GPT without losing anything.

 

From an elevated command prompt, type (without quotes):

mbr2gpt /convert /disk:0 /allowFullOS and hit enter

Assuming disk 0 is your boot disk which is currently MBR, this will convert it to GPT and not harm your system, files, etc. (i.e. you won't see a difference.)  Then, when you try survival kit, it will use the full 7tb drive (except 2gb for survival kits boot stuff).  I just did it to my intel SSD boot disk, which was MBR, and now Acronis is using the full 8tb of my usb backup drive.

 

Hope that helped.