Backing up System Reserved and Bitlocker (Windows 7)

There could well be some confusion here because when booted from the TI recovery disk the drive letters displayed are not the same as those shown in windows.
In windows the SR partition is not assigned a drive letter. It does however show up as partition C in the Acronis recovery environment. It is designated as primary and active. It is after all from where the boot process begins. Your Windows C drive is now called D in the Acronis environment.
So to backup the entire OS you should backup C and D if you are starting from the Acronis CD. Your Data which is on Windows D will not be included unless you seek it out under a different drive letter.

However Running an OS backup whilst booted in Windows is a lot more simple, it is only when restoring that confusion may arise. It is for this reason that it is recommended that all HDD partitions are given descriptive names so that they can be identified without having to refer to the transistory drive letters.
I suggest that you look at your HDD in Windows disk Management as it is there that all the partitions are shown including the hidden ones which may not be assigned a drive letter.

Have you considered using Window's System restore to fullfil your Backup requirements for the OS ? It would be a ot easier and just as effective as using Acronis for this trivial task.

My own safety kit put together before taking a note book on a trip would be to make a full HDD backup image to an external Portable HDD. I would take this drive and the TI recovery CD along with the note book. To be even more secure and have the ability to be up and running in short order an additional replacement hard drive would save having to wait to obtain a replacemet should a total drive fail occur.
These precautions would enable full drive images and restores to be tested and practised to perfection before a real emergency arises.

John,

Are you backing from Windows or from the CD?
To backup a bitlocker encrypted disk, you have to use ATI in Windows. http://kb.acronis.com/content/1734.

You might want to keep D:\ selected, but add folder exclusions to exclude some of the D:\ content. This way your backup can be small, while the partitions information is preserved.
Don't forget in this case to backup the D:\ content that you excluded in another backup: when you restore your backup, everything will be erased on the destination disk, but the excluded content will not be restored.

Finally, remember to encrypt your backups using ATI, since the data in the backups will not be encrypted.

Xpilot, my attempted backup was from within Windows and not TI recovery CD. My SR is indeed on drive D, according to Acronis. My disk management only shows C and D partitions, and nothing else. D is marked as “System, primary, active,” which I am not sure is correct. Maybe that’s why SR is on D? If so, I’d say this mess up is because I tried to restore my W7 with Acronis, unsuccessfully, and it somehow messed up my D partition.

System restore does not work as well as I’d like. The reason I have Acronis is so that I can have robust images I can move around. System restore doesn’t work like this and with time automatically deletes old backups. It’s not an option for me. Also, security is a concern for me and taking an entire duplicate of my data on an external HD is not a very secure way to travel.

Pat, yes I backed up from within Windows. Also note that I haven’t enabled BitLocker yet and would be happy if I could at least have a fully restorable backup of the OS without BitLocker. Finally, when backing up partitions, Acronis doesn’t allow excluding specific files from that partition. Even if it did, restoring an empty D partition would wipe out my data, therefore that’s not a solution either.

I am still looking for a solution. If anyone from Acronis is reading this, I would appreciate an input. It should not be so damn difficult to make a copy of an OS. I really don’t need to have an “image” of anything else other than my OS. That’s the only reason I have used Acronis thus far.

John Frank wrote:

Finally, when backing up partitions, Acronis doesn’t allow excluding specific files from that partition.

Yes, you can exclude files from a partition backup.

Even if it did, restoring an empty D partition would wipe out my data, therefore that’s not a solution either.

correct. First, this approach is for troubleshooting, as it makes the backup smaller and will help you experiment with various options to see if you can complete the backup and whether you can include the partition. Second you could run another file backup for the content excluded from the partition image.
Also, you could swith to disk mode and select the entire disk, still add your exclusions and test.

Once you have found a setting that works, you can decide whether to remove the exclusions or keep them as part of your backup strategy.

Thanks to help from other forums, I resolved this issue. Here is a guide:

My boot files were placed in partition D (Acronis messup) and I was finally able to create a separate System Reserved Partition (SRP) and I can now encrypt partition D with BitLocker and backup System Reserved separately. I’d like to give back to the community by writing a complete guide here because I haven’t seen a single guide that address this correctly.
For those with this same problem, the first thing you need to do is go to your Disk Management (type this in your Start address bar and click on “Create and format hard disk partitions” in the search results). In there, you must see System Reserved as one of your partitions. If it’s not there, then it is likely in one of your other partitions (except C). Now that you know the problem, you can apply this guide:

1. In Disk Management, right click on one of your partitions (except C), preferably the last one location on the HD that contains partition C, and select “Shrink Volume.”
2. For the “amount of space to shrink” enter 200MB (this is better than the native 100MB if you’re using BitLocker). Press Shrink
3. Right click on the newly created unallocated space and select “New simple volume”
4. Specify the volume size of 200, then select “Do not assign a drive letter”
5. Label the volume “System Reserved” and uncheck “Quick format.” Finish the process.
6. Right click on the newly created System Reserved and select “Mark Partition as Active”
7. Insert Windows 7 DVD or USB stick and make sure BIOS is set to boot from it
8. Once you boot from W7 setup, select “Repair System” and then “Startup Repair”
9. Once that’s complete, remove the USB/DVD and restart
10. You’re done, but keep this in mind. Sometimes you need to run the repair three times before Windows can boot correctly, so don’t give up after it doesn’t work the first time. In fact, it probably won’t work after repairing just once.

Now, as afar as Acronis is concerned, I still don't have any answers. When I backed up my initial setup, I had in fact backed up SRP and partition C. However, when I tried to RESTORE that backup, Acronis placed my SRP INSIDE my partition D. What is the solution to this?

Let's break down the question: now that I have backed up partition C AND SRP, how can I restore them so that I have a bootable OS even if I do that on a completely new hard drive? I am really hoping I can get at least some answers here because this is a rudimentary procedure.

Thank you.

John,

ATI puts the partition back where the user tells it to. What happens often is that some users get confused because the recovery CD, and, for that matter, the driver that shows the content of a backup file in Windows explorer, gives the partition letter D:\ to the system reserved partition. This is an artefact of the presentation of the information. ATI is not changing the partition information in any way, but presenting it in a confusing way.
When this confusion happens, you can easily imagine that users simply restore partition D (Acronis, system reserved) to the actual Windows D:\ partition they might have, or the files in D (Acronis, system reserved) to their D:\ folder.

Thanks for the help, Pat. I know what you mean. For example, in the POST repair environment Windows also marks drive C as "D." But we all know that Microsoft/Windows does have issues and I think Acronis could make this easier for the users.

So if we set aside the user confusion, can we assume that if System Reserved and drive C are correctly chosen from within Acronis (while logged into Windows) that the recovery will produce a fully bootable OS? Will this also work if all partitions are encrypted by BitLocker (except SRP, of course)? Also, can Acronis recover this backup if the backup file is located in a BitLocker encrypted partition?

Finally, I could not quickly find information on Master Boot Record (MBR). Whenever we recover a partition backup from Acronis, there is also an option to recover MBR, which is basically an information that Acronis itself has overwritten. The help files indicate that MBR should not be selected when recovering partitions and that user must run the recovery a second time to recover MBR separately. I don't quite understand this. What happens if MBR recovery is skipped? If it "provides access to a hidden partition," presumably SRP, wouldn't the OS be unbootable then until MBR is also recovered? If this is the case, then this recovery has to happen from Acronis boot CD.

John,

I cannot answer your question because I religiously stay away from restoring from within Windows. I always restore from the recovery CD.
When you use bitlocker, Acronis says you have to backup the partition from Windows. When you restore, the partition will be unencrypted. Acronis cannot access a partition that is in a Bitlocker encrypted partition. If you want to protect your backup, you can encrypt the backup file using ATI, and/or you can create an Acronis Secure Zone and use a password to protect it.

You can find here some information about the MBR http://forum.acronis.com/forum/17793# . A couple of things to know about the MBR:
- restoring the MBR doesn't affect the partition table when restored alone, it does restore any boot code in the MBR (for example if you have a boot loader, code to boot into a recovery partitin, etc.),
- when you select *all* the partitions in a disk abckup *and* the MBR from the recovery CD, it is the same as selecting the entire disk, and all existing partitions/data will be deleted from the target disk before the backup is restored,
- restoring the MBR isn't necessary for the vast majority of cases when you restore on the same disk, unless, of course, the MBR has been screwed up by some malware, user error or boot loader mess,
- restoring the MBR is necessary when you restore to a blank disk.

PS: i always restore my ssd as a complete disk, including the MBR and System Reserved, simply because the incremental cost of doing it minuscule, but it is not necessary.