How to upgrade a Survival Kit?
I have no great need for an ATI Survival Kit but I created one during the 2020 Beta test. A while ago I decided I'd better upgrade it to Build 21400 if it was going to be of any use. Not a straightforward task. Is it even possible?
There is no "Upgrade" function, and creation is available only when creating a backup task. I deleted the task, went through the "Add existing" process, and selected the "Create the Acronis Survival Kit". It thought for awhile and then said "Unable to make drive bootable". That seemed odd since the drive had been bootable, but I had other things to do so I gave up.
I went back today and looked at the drive. There is still a 2GB and ATI still displays the Survival Kit icon on the task, but I don't think the drive is currently bootable. (I'm accessing the PC with Remote Desktop right now so can't actually try.) Even if it is bootable, I'm sure the partition was not rebuilt with the Build 21400. I can start over by reformatting the drive, but that would not be appropriate for somebody actually depending on the backups on the drive. So what is the intended procedure for upgrading a Survival Kit?
To answer your post though, yeah, I don't think the checks and balances are there when the survival kit fails. I've ended up with several 2GB partitions when purposely breaking one to see if it would repair or not.
The only thing that has consistently worked for me is to nuke the 2GB partition and then rebuild it, but yeah, not something all users will be comfortable doing.
Just curious, but what type of drive are you creating it on? I am finding that my sandisk ultrafit 3.1 (64GB) flash drives are pure garbage. Everytime I go to create the survival kit on them they fail, and I don't think it's Acronis fault. The drives keep ending up in write-protected mode and only by some luck with minitool can I bring them back to life. I have to switch it from MBR to GPT (or vice-versa - depends on what it was when it goes into protected mode). Then I have to delete the partitions, recreate it and switch it to FAT32. At that point, I have control of it again.
And yeah, it is the drives. I can't even do anything with it in diskpart because it says "no write access"!
So, we may have more issues going on in the background with some of these flash drives than I would have previously thought possible because the trouble starts to come when trying to partition them, which is a fairly new feature of Windows 10, not previously possible. This Amazon review explains exactly what is happening to me with this drive, but at least I'm able to bring it back to life again.
and apparently, some SanDisk drives do lock themselves and it's known, but a safety feature (which makes no sense, since the data is held hostage on it when this happens).
https://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8656/~/write-protect-error-on-usb-flash-drives
The drive in question is an old Seagate 1TB USB drive - a real (but ancient) HDD. I had no trouble creating the original Survival Kit so I don't think there's an issue with the drive itself. I don't really need a Survival Kit so I'm not going to spend much time on this. My real question was whether there was an official Acronis-supported technique for doing an upgrade of a Survival Kit. It seems like the answer is "No".
I'll probably submit a Feedback on this. There needs to be a way to create a new copy of the Survival Kit whenever a new build of ATI is released.
Yeah, the only way I've seen the upgrade offered is if using an older version of Acronis (and related survival kit as the destination for a backup)... upgrading True Image to a newer version and then being offered to update the survival kit. I wish you could create / modify a survival kit at anytime just like with the rescue media builder.
Acronis has no official way to upgrade the Survival Kit. The best way to upgrade it would be to create a recovery WinPE media on a USB flash drive and copy out the boot.wim file from the sources folder. Then assign a drive letter to the 2 GB Survival Kit partition. Now just copy the new boot.wim file replacing the boot.wim file in the sources folder of the Survival Kit. Then remove the drive letter. This allows you to have the media you like in the Survival Kit. I have used the MVP Tool on mine.
I'll give that a try ... once I determine that I haven't messed up the MVP tool.
However, I don't think that should be the recommended technique for the average customer that may not know what a partition is, let alone the boot.wim file. And most people using the MVP Tool probably aren't very interested in the Survival Kit. And I suspect that most people using the MVP Tool probably are not very interested in the Survival Kit.
Yeah, probably not the best method for everyone, but it's the only real way to keep it updated if not offered an option through the app at this time.
I did find that if you mount the hidden 2GB partition and rename it, that True Image will give you the option to build it again. The problem is, you're still having to go out of your way to assign it a drive letter and then again to rename it. And on top of that, doing this doesn't replace what's on the existing 2GB partition, but seems to create an entirely 2GB boot partition. And to compound that, both are bootable and will show up in the bios which can be really confusing for some people.
So, updating the way Mustang mentions, is probably the best option for now. That's better than messing with outright reformatting of partitions or removing them.. but there is definitely still some improvement here that could be developed into the survival kit creation process.
Bobbo_3C0X1 wrote:...
I did find that if you mount the hidden 2GB partition and rename it, that True Image will give you the option to build it again. The problem is, you're still having to go out of your way to assign it a drive letter and then again to rename it. And on top of that, doing this doesn't replace what's on the existing 2GB partition, but seems to create an entirely 2GB boot partition. And to compound that, both are bootable and will show up in the bios which can be really confusing for some people.
Unfortunately, Disk Management won't let me do anything with the 2GB partition. It shows no options for dealing with the partition except "Delete"; I can't assign a drive letter to it. However, I can boot from it so I know it is still intact (with an earlier build of ATI).
Someone else has been having similar issue: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/acronis-true-image-2020-forum/survival-kit-creation
Minitool to the rescue. I've had my own share of problems with Windows detecting the partitions on this drive after the survival kit was run - especially on flash drives (even at a point where diskpart and Windows explorer both say the disk is locked in protection mode!)
After I build a survival kit (really just for testing as I prefer my own rescue media method), I've been completely rebooting before messing with disk management and/or minitool again - seems to help (sometimes). For instance, if I don't reboot, i'll hear the USB mount, see it in disk managment, but not in Windows File explorer. Yet, sometimes, I can still manually type in the drive letter in explorer and get to it anyway, and other times not. This feels more like Windows 10 weirdness, but not sure.
sadam hagroo wrote:Here is the answer
Maybe I've missed it but I don't see anything about updating the Survival kit after it has been created. Creating new backups on the drive is, of course, no problem, but replacing an old build of Survival Kit with a new build has not been addresses as near as I can tell.
Patrick,
Here's a quote from the last paragraph in the kb 61639 referenced above:
More information
Remember to update your Acronis Survival Kit after you install a new build of Acronis True Image: plug in the external drive/USB flash with Survival Kit and open the backup with that drive as a destination; the program will automatically offer to update Acronis Survival Kit on that drive.
I have triggered this update feature however, I have not run it to see if it is successful. I do know that was unable to get the feature to work in TI 2019.