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Acronis Survival Kit - How To Create / No Prompt to Create

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Following up on my question from yesterday: I picked up a WD 1TB USB Hard Drive. In exploring it with Acronis, I notice I'm not getting the prompt to create the Survival Kit as I had hoped. What do I need to do to the new drive so that Acronis thinks it can create the survival kit on it? 

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I had read all of those before. This is a 1TB drive, so the 2TB article doesn't apply. Both the How to Create and the article presume you get the prompt for the survival kit. My problem is: "Click on Create Acronis Survival Kit (this option appears only when a suitable external hard drive is selected as a destination)". For some reason, with this 1TB USB Hard Drive, it is not giving the option (or didn't appear to be, when I did a quick check last night). How do I make Acronis realize this is a suitable external hard drive?

 

Daniel, can you see the contents of the 1TB drive in Windows Explorer even if it has no actual files yet?

Next, can you Eject the drive to show that Windows sees it as a removable drive?

Finally, can you confirm you do have ATI 2019 installed as this option only applies with this, not for any earlier versions?

Restarting the computer with the drive disconnected then connecting it after you get to the Windows Desktop may resolve this issue.

I'll test this evening when I get home. I know I have ATI 2019, as I get the survival kit prompt on another drive of mine. I know I can eject the drive (I did that last night). I haven't looked at the contents, but I did change the drive letter. I haven't restarted since I connected the drive, so I'll try that tonight.

Presuming all those work, any suggestions? Should I try reformatting that drive (I believe it was NTFS out of the box)? If so, how?

 

Daniel, there shouldn't be a need to reformat the drive if it is already NTFS.

You can create the Survival Kit manually if you wish to give it a try - I use this method myself so that I have more control of what happens to my drives!

You will need a partition manager such as the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software.  Install the software then create a small 2GB FAT32 partition at the start of the 1TB USB drive by resizing the existing NTFS partition to make the space available.  Give the new 2GB FAT32 partition a Windows Drive Letter, i.e. drive S:

Check that you can see the new drive letter (S:) in Windows Explorer.

Now open the normal Acronis Rescue Media Builder tool and use this to create the rescue media using the new drive letter (S:).

That's it.

To test the survival kit works, restart the computer and select the USB drive from your Boot menu options (i.e. F12 on Dell computers - other keys for other makes), or else configure BIOS to allow boot from the USB device.  Note: if doing the latter, make a careful note of what your current boot settings are and set this back when done testing.

You will need a partition manager such as the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software.  Install the software then create a small 2GB FAT32 partition at the start of the 1TB USB drive by resizing the existing NTFS partition to make the space available.  Give the new 2GB FAT32 partition a Windows Drive Letter, i.e. drive S:

Can you also do this from the Windows 10 Disk Management control panel tool (the one where you can change drive letters and resize partitions)?

Daniel, you can take the option to Shrink your partition using Disk Management but this will always be to take the free space from the end of the partition whereas a partition manager would allow you to choose where to take the space from.  The survival kit normally sits at the start of the drive but there should be no reason why it shouldn't work if at the end instead.

Just an update: I was able to create the Acronis Survival Kit without problem. Next is returning the system to HP for repair, and then restoring it when it is returned (if necessary - if they wipe the System SSD)... and hoping there are no Windows activation problems (my only remaining worry).

Daniel, good to hear the survival kit is created.  Make sure that you make a full disk & partitions backup of your SSD before returning the system to HP.  I would recommend having 2 backups on different drives, if available, for good measure!

You should also test booting from the survival kit media and ensure the BIOS boot mode used is the same as that used by Windows.  Run the msinfo command in Windows to check what the BIOS mode used is.

See KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

Finally, please take a look at forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document showing this process for recovery.

I did confirm that I could boot from the Survival media, although I didn't test the actual restore. I'm making full backups of the C: (SSD) and D: (Hard Disk) drives to three different USB hard drives, including the one with the Survival Kit. (I'm also backing up the D: drive to the Acronis cloud) I haven't been formally backing up the recovery partition. The BIOS is using UEFI boot, and changing the boot order to boot from a USB Hard Drive worked just fine.

 

Sounds good Daniel - the only other suggestion, should the system come back from HP with a vanilla Windows OS install, is to make a full disk backup of that too before going for the restore of your current OS data etc.  That would give you an option to practice the restore with a much smaller backup image.

Another late thought, what about removing the D: hard disk from the computer before returning to HP - that way the drive will stay 'as is' and can just be put back when the system is returned?

Removing the D: drive is not an option: The system is going back to HP because of an intermittent scraping or mechanical noise from that drive. The SMART stats are mostly OK, other than raw read errors and seek errors.

In another discussion thread, a similar suggestion was made to backup the new system disk if necessary. I thought about it -- although that might mean having to install Chrome and to redownload and reinstall acronis (bumping the number of used licenses) to do so. If I can do it from the Acronis Recovery environment, I might do so (but then comes the issue of ... where? Yet another USB drive?). 

I do plan, however, to start up the new version of Windows, and to make sure I copy and write down the Windows product key before doing the restore.

 

Daniel, your Acronis Survival Kit can be used to perform all the functions of the installed application, i.e. for Backup, Recovery, Cloning, so no need to download and install ATI on your returned system, just boot it from the external drive, make the backup to the same drive to a different target folder and using a unique file name.