Skip to main content

Acronis Recovery flash - using space on the flash disc

Thread needs solution

Hi, this is my first post here. I have a general question that probably applies across all versions:

Acronis recovery USB flash only requires about 500mB of space on a bootable flash drive. These days most flash drives are several Gb in size upwards. Does the community know if a flash drive can contain a second formatted partition to use the remaining space disc space, e.g to hold a .tib(x) recovery file on the same drive?

I tried formatting the remaining space but as the Acronis recovery flash was formatted as bootable, Windows did not see the second partition. Is there a workaround solution? Thanks

0 Users found this helpful

Jim, welcome to these public User Forums.

Your comment suggesting the Acronis rescue media only requires around 500MB of space on the bootable media is no longer correct and with later versions it can now require double that space and sometimes more than 2GB with the latest ACPHO version.

There are limitations imposed by Microsoft on having more than one partition on flash media which gives the issue with Windows not seeing a second partition.

The only method around this is to use an external USB HDD (or SSD) using a Survival Kit approach where there can be a 2GB FAT32 boot partition along with the remainder of the drive being given as an NTFS partition for storage of backup images!

The option to create a Survival Kit is only offered when you are creating a new Disks & Partitions (or Entire PC) type backup task and are setting the Destination for the task to a suitable external USB drive that can be used for this purpose.
See KB 61639: Acronis True Image: how to create Acronis Survival Kit - for more information on the process.
Also KB 61738: Acronis True Image: Survival Kit disk partition for backups is limited to 2TB on BIOS-booted systems
And Acronis Article:  The Acronis Survival Kit

Hi, this is my first post here. I have a general question that probably applies across all versions:

Acronis recovery USB flash only requires about 500mB of space on a bootable flash drive. These days most flash drives are several Gb in size upwards. Does the community know if a flash drive can contain a second formatted partition to use the remaining space disc space, e.g to hold a .tib(x) recovery file on the same drive?

I tried formatting the remaining space but as the Acronis recovery flash was formatted as bootable, Windows did not see the second partition. Is there a workaround solution? Thanks

I have done exactly what you have requested on two of my flash drives. This is an example of my 128GB drive separated in to two drives, one is for 1GB, the other is the remainder of the 128GB. If I remember correctly, I just let Acronis format the drive as a Recovery Flash Drive and then I used Minitool Partition Wizard 12.6 Free to shrink the partition to 1GB and add another partition to the flash drive. I keep a couple of system backups on the extra space. 

image 719

EDIT: Oh, and as Steve says, I did have to make the extra 100+ GB partition an NT partition.