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Boot Media and Acronis Survival Toolkit not booting

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Hi,

I have created both a USB Bootmedia and USB Acronis survival toolkit, however both will not boot on my computer. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3. I have selected legacy mode in the bios as it is a legacy Win 10 install.I have tried usb 2.0 and usb 3.0 ports, tried different usb sticks of various sizes and none will boot. I get a Acronis boot Image logo and then the screen turns black with a blinking cursor.  

I know the Motherboard is old but this is causing me issues not being able to do a system restore.

Thanks

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Paul, welcome to these public User Forums.

What size of USB stick have you tried here?  The minimum size should be 2GB and maximum size 32GB, formatted as FAT32.

See KB 58108: Acronis products: using USB sticks with more than 32GB capacity

Next, which type of Rescue Media have you tried with your older Gigabyte motherboard?  There are 3 different type of rescue media that you can create - Linux, Windows RE based, and Windows PE media.

See KB 61632: Acronis True Image 2019: how to create bootable media

What type of Legacy Win 10 OS is involved here - is it 64-bit or 32-bit, if the latter, then you may need to use the older Linux type rescue media.

Hi Steve,

I have tried a 2GB and 32GB drive. 

When i was creating the rescue media I chose "simple" which i believe defaults to Linux. I have not tried the advance option yet.

Win10 is 64bit

Interestingly I found an old usb stick which was 4GB and had ATI 2014 on it and my computer will boot straight into it.

Paul, the 'simple' method of creating rescue media will try to create Windows RE based media - taking files from your Windows Recovery Environment, whereas with ATI 2014 this would be the older Linux based media.

You can create the same Linux type of media in ATI 2019 but need to click on the Advanced method to see the option to do so.

Steve, I selected Advanced and created a Linux type boot media but I am getting the same result. I get to a splash screen where I can select the product i want to boot to but no matter what one I choose (ATI 64bit, ATI etc) I get a Acronis splash screen for a couple of secs then a black screen.

 

Thanks

 

Paul

Paul, how long have you let it sit on the black screen as this can take a few minutes sometimes?

ATI 2014 was purely legacy boot.

ATI is uefi / legacy capable now. If the bios defaults to uefi, but secure boot is enabled, you may not be able to continue with current rescue media

Use the one time boot menu of your bios and see if you have a uefi and or legacy boot option for your rescue media and try both if there are options to see how each behaves.

 

 

I do not have any option for secure boot, to enable or disable. I have "USB Legacy Function" enabled and the only other thing i can see that might be relevant is CD/DVD boot option which is at Auto but one of the settings on it is EFI. I have tried different combination of these and none work, although as I said the 2014 ATI boot disk works.

Paul, I am starting to run out of new ideas here with regards to the Acronis Rescue Media - the good news is that your ATI 2014 boot disk works and would probably work if needed for recovery.

We have been focusing on USB boot media, so the next suggestion has to be creating a boot CD or DVD instead and testing with that.

I would also suggest testing a Windows 10 Recovery USB stick which you can make by following the steps given on webpage: Create a recovery drive - alternatively, use the Microsoft Media Creation tool to make an Install USB stick.  This should help show whether this issue is limited only to the Acronis media, or would apply to any boot media?

Have you tried the F12 one time boot menu to see what options you have for booting the USB? Even if the system is set to allow legacy, it may try to boot external by uefi by default.

Also, we have seen a lot of users in the forum fix boot issues on usb by doing a diskpart /clean and/or a full usb format instead of aa quick format. Other tools can place hidden partitions on the drive that are not seen in windows (causing boot issues when other tools try to make them bootable but the other partitions are not identifiediat build totthe tool) and this will clean then up before rebuilding rescue media.

As the issue is not only with survival kit, but also with recovery media (and also with both Linux and WinRE), I'd lean to a specific issue on that flash drive. As Steve suggested though, let's try a DVD as well and see if things are the same or not.

Thanks for all the replies. The USB stick was brand new (purchased from a shop) and had not been used with any other software. I had also tried other USB sticks with the same result. I have been able to boot to other rescue media namely 'Active Disk'. Initially my computer crashed and i was unable to recover it so had to do a fresh install of Windows 10, this is why i then purchased ATI 2019. During the fresh install of Win10 i did however have problems installing on to my Primary Drive. The only way I was able to install Windows was to disconnect my other 2 drives. I think the message at the time was unable to create partition. Thinking about this now, may the other drives possibly be causing an issue with the recovery media?

Paul, it difficult to say whether the other 2 drives are involved in this issue.

If you have another computer you can test with, then try booting your USB rescue media / Survival Kit drive on that other computer, as that will help isolate whether this issue is down to your main computer or the media etc.

For what it's worth, my last 2 systems were home built with Gigabyte boards.

My last one (before the current) had a lot of weird issues in the bios which were often resolved by a bios reset or a firmware update.

For instance, I noticed the one time boot menu would show previous USB drives as boot options even though they weren't attached. And, as I have 5 is drives all the same, they would all have the same name in the boot menu and it would be roulette picking the right one. Only fix when this happened was to reset the bios!

Then, i built my new system because I thought the old one finally died as it would not do anything after powering up after a recovery. I found that after resetting the bios, pulling the cmos battery, disconnecting ac power, pressing the power button 10 times and then powering up, it still didn't even get to the bios. However, repeating and waiting a full day, then it did come back to life.

AND another user in these forums found themselves in the exact same scenario on a different Gigabyte board and waiting as long fixed them too!!

So, what's my point?

This could be a funky Gigabyte bios issue as well. It would be good to try testing the rescue media on another system to see if it works on it or not. 

In the mean time, have you also checked the manufacturer website for a bios firmware update? Gigabyte has been trying to standardize firmware versions on many systems - even older ones. Mine is at f22j.

 

The rescue media boots fine in other systems. The gigabyte board i have came out at the time Uefi bios's were just being introduced. I believe the implementation on my board was a 50/50 type thing where it was neither full UEFI nor full legacy. The rev 2.0 of the board has a full Uefi bios that you can download. Unfortunately i have the rev 1.0. I've had funky issues with this board from day one, and because of this and the recent crash of the system where i lost all my data I think im going to purchase and build a new computer. Thanks for all the suggestions and help anyway. 

I guess next question is will i be able to transfer ATI 2019 easily to my new computer?

Paul, transferring your license for ATI 2019 is fairly straight-forward. 

See KB 61162: Acronis True Image 2019: "You've exceeded the maximum number of activations for this serial number" - which explains the process for when needed.