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Computer Will Not Boot From USB Drive

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Hi all,

My USB recovery media will not boot properly. I am getting MBR errors for some reason.

Is this common with version 2018? For what it's worth, I tried using the flash drive in another PC, and got the same results.

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My USB recovery media will not boot properly. I am getting MBR errors for some reason.

Is this common with version 2018? For what it's worth, I tried using the flash drive in another PC, and got the same results.

Rusty, how old is your USB recovery media and has it ever worked correctly?

What type of media is this, i.e. is this a USB flash drive or stick, what size is it, how is it formatted?

I am not aware of any specific issues with rescue media for ATI 2018 but Acronis have changed the method of creating rescue media as part of moving away from using Linux for the boot OS and are now defaulting to trying to create WinPE media based on your Windows Recovery Environment.

See KB 60091: Acronis True Image 2018: how Simple bootable media creation mode works  and  KB 60820: Acronis True Image 2018: how to create bootable media

Steve, I am using a fairly new PNY 16 GB flash drive, and this is the first time I ever recall creating USB bootable media for Acronis (I've had the product for less than a year). The PNY is formatted in FAT32, but doesn't Acronis format such a drive accordingly anyway? I have created bootable media successfully on this same drive using Macrium Reflect, so I'm assuming the PNY is OK. At least there are no disk errors to speak of.

At first, I thought my installation of ATI (Acronis True Image) was corrupt. I tried repairing the installation, but that option was not available. However, upon uninstalling and during the attempted reinstall, ATI alerted me to a newer version of the product, which I downloaded and installed successfully.

For what it's worth, I have a bootable CD that works well, although it is slow to load (understandably).

 

Rusty, most issues with USB drives are normally resolved by doing a full format of the drive - the Acronis media builder only does a quick format, not full.

Steve Smith wrote:

Rusty, most issues with USB drives are normally resolved by doing a full format of the drive - the Acronis media builder only does a quick format, not full.

I tried formatting the PNY in Windows 7 using default values, re-created fresh boot media for said drive, but still couldn't get past the MBR boot errors at restart.

I found an older Kingston Data Traveler 2.0 (2 GB), and I created boot media on it, and it worked!

I don't know what the difference is between the two flash drives except for storage capacity. I'm stumped as to why one worked and the other didn't. I guess flash drives are not created equal? For what it's worth, I let Acronis format the Kingston - not Windows.

**SOLVED**

 

An online search brought me to this page...

Create a Bootable USB Flash Drive

After examining both USB drives in Computer Management, I noticed the Kingston was listed as a active partition, and the PNY was not. I dutifully followed the prompts in the above link using Windows' diskpart tool, and now the PNY is listed as active too. I then created new Acronis bootable media, and PNY booted right up upon restart!

Evidently, I have tinkered with so many USB burning tools such as Rufus, and Tuxboot on the PNY, the drive lost its active status.

So, the morrow of the story is that any partition / drive has to be declared active before Windows can boot off of it. Looking back now, I remember that in dealing with replacement harddrives, but it's not something I do everyday, and it slipped my mind.

Anyway, thanks for your help, Steve, and Merry Christmas!

By the way, how do you mark a thread as solved?

I found the answer, but my post is up for moderation at the moment.

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rusty wrote:

By the way, how do you mark a thread as solved?

I found the answer, but my post is up for moderation at the moment.

Thank you for sharing the solution! Currently there is no such functionality on forum, but we'reworking on adding this logic, so I hope in Jan-Feb we'll be able to mark topics as Resolved (with the corresponding links to comments that contributed to the solution)

Rusty, great you found the solution here & thanks for sharing / wishing you a Merry Christmas!