Skip to main content

Cannot restore: AIT changes image!

Thread needs solution

About two years back I used ATI2020 to make a (TIBX) image for a harddisk in a relatively old DELL system.

I now wanted to restore that image to a small SSD to be able to use that system again (the original HD is gone).

The moment I start the restore however, ATI tells me it's converting the MBR image to GPT and it seems there's no way to avoid that. I tested the result anyway and my system doesn't boot GPT disks (even used a tool to convert GPT > MBR without data loss, but that failed as well).

It seems that ATI therefore cannot be used for MBR. As that is not advertised, I hope I'm missing something here and maybe this forum can be of help.

0 Users found this helpful

Erik, Acronis will convert any recovered disk image to match the BIOS boot mode of the system where the recovery is being performed.

If you want to recover a MBR disk image and retain it as MBR then you need to do so on the system where it will be used and that system is booting in Legacy BIOS boot mode.

All Acronis rescue media is capable of being used to boot in both Legacy and UEFI boot modes.

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

OK, thank you. So if I have a backup of an old system on an external HD and I have ATI on my main system, plus a dock where I can connect the disk (intended for the old system) where I want to write my TIBX to... I can't (assuming the old system is/was MBR and my main system is GPT)?

That's a bit weird, don't you think? All I'm asking is a bit-for-bit image recovery and somehow ATI interferes and decides by itself it should change the image written to the recovery disk because it assumes I'll use that for my main system?

Instead, I should now create a bootable image from my ATI on a USB, then boot from there on my old system. Then connect two disks to that old system somehow: one with the TIBX file and one empty where the recovery will go to?

It yes, then I understand. I still think that's not logical and ATI should leave my backups as they are (giving me the OPTION to convert to GPT would be nice maybe, but forcing it?)

Erik, this is an issue that has been raised very many times by other users, i.e. the migrating of MBR to UEFI without offering the user any option to not do so!

The options available are:

If your PC supports booting in Legacy mode, then you could boot it using rescue media in that mode to do the recovery without migration.

If not, then the recovery would need to be performed on the original PC using rescue media, where ideally, the target drive is installed in the PC ready to become the OS boot drive and with the backup image to be recovered on an external USB drive.

Please submit Feedback directly to Acronis (use the tool provided in the GUI Help section) and ask for your vote to be added to the Acronis internal feature request: TI-179333 Allow selecting the boot mode (BIOS or UEFI) after recovery/cloning.