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A no boot Problem restoring a tib disk backup wirh Acronis 2020

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I have a vintage home made tower running W10 – 64 pc (MBR bios only) where I needed to replace a failed OS SSD with a new one. My plan was to restore the OS to a new SSD with my latest Acronis disk backup (tib) using the self booting restore disk made by my Acronis 2020. Nothing exotic – I thought.

So I went through the steps (add new disk & recover) and some where along the line I must have left out a step or made a mistake because the new SSD would not boot the old machine.

So I repeated the process and this time I made cell phone shots of the log files generated by the two process from preparing the SSD to doing the restore. Got the same result - no boot. (I have these as jpg files if there is any interest in seeing them)

To find out if there were any files on the new SDD I booted the machine with an Ubuntu CD and verified that yes there were some there.

Next I booted the machine with a W10 install disk to get a command prompt so I could enter some bootrec commands (rebuild, fixmbr, fix boot). Result → Rebuild & fixmbr both ran ok. Fixboot gave me an 'access denied' response. Still no boot.

Next I pulled the SSD and put it into a usb docking station on another w10 machine to have a look at what was actually on the disk. The mounted 'properties' show as Read only & Hidden. (I have a jpg of screen if needed) The disk appears to have the full 37.5 GB of the OS that I want. I conclude that the the 2020 version appears to read the tib file ok.

I would also expect that the Acronis software would respect and keep the attributes of the files it was restoring but if the boot process can't find an OS, is this the problem that I am looking at?

-----------Would appreciate some expert eyes on this problem so I can get back on line with this machine. . .-------.

I see a file up load feature at the end of this form so I will attach the jpg camera screen shots.

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1 screen shot.jpg 319.83 KB
2 screen shot.jpg 306.98 KB
3 screen shot.jpg 600.03 KB
4 screen shot docking station.jpg 74.38 KB
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John, welcome to these public User Forums.

More questions initially than answers!

When you used the Add new disk option - what partition scheme format for the disk did you choose?  The options are MBR or GPT.
Note: when using Add new disk, there is no need to create any partitions as these get wiped out as the first step of any recovery!

Does your PC support both MBR and UEFI, or is it absolutely MBR / Legacy boot only?

Was your backup of the original working Windows 10 OS created as a Disks & Partitions backup?  I ask because with ATI 2020 all new Disks & Partitions backups now use .tibx files, not .tib (unless you have a backup task created by an earlier version of ATI that is being used).

When doing the restore of your backup, this needs to be done as a Disk & Partition restore and at the top Disk selection level.

Please see forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document which shows a step-by-step tutorial for doing this type of recovery / restore.

Reply from John received via a private message instead of in the forum.

Thanks Steve for responding to the inquiry and suggesting the PDF tutorial. I was able to follow it and did get a successful message at the conclusion of the Acronis session. However I still get a “no operating system” at boot time.

Here are some answers to the questions you posed above that might help in resolving the issue:

  1. The partition scheme format for the disk = MBR. The SSD I am recovering is only for the W10 OS 64. I have temporally removed the data disk to reduce clutter. Mother board is an ASUS M3A78 (2008 vintage).

  2. All my OS backups were made as full disk backups with an ATI using tib format. Going forward I will be using the tibx format.

Trying to see what is going on I booted the machine with a W10 cd and selected the CMD line option. From there I ran “diskpart” then “list disk”. From these I could confirm that the disk was definitely setup as an MBR partition.

Going back to “diskpart list vol” I could see two entries, One for the cd drive and one for the SSD that holds the restored OS. The restored SSD disk is listed as Fs=NTFS, Type=Partition.

It appears that part of the OS is lacking in the backup ATI file. Can you suggest where to go from here?

John, does your restored system have a small Microsoft System Reserved partition that is normally used to host the Windows Boot Configuration Data store files?

Have you tried putting back your data disk since doing the recovery?  I ask because it is possible that the BCD files could be stored on that second disk instead of the new SSD?

Beyond the above questions, then I would suggest booting the computer from a Windows 10 install DVD or USB stick and going into the Recovery options to see if you can do a Startup Repair from the media after selecting your Windows location?

See webpage:  How to Repair Windows Bootloader Problems (If Your Computer Won’t Start)

Steve - No luck on the data disk so I solved this problem by buying a new oem license for reinstalling Windows. The time consumed by trying to fix this issue was just not becoming worth the effort. Better things in life to do.

However, thanks for your suggestions and support along the way.

John