SOLVED!!! Toshiba C855-S5350 15.6" Laptop will not boot from Bootable media (TI2013 build 6514)

to add to the confusion.... I put the toshiba harddrive into the dell laptop and booted with the acronis boot disk. It booted fine from the CD and I did a backup to an external harddrive. Then to test, I restored the image to a new harddrive mounted external to the Dell. Acronis claimed no errors occured and everything worked fine.

So in theory i have a 2nd harddrive with the toshiba image. I installed this new drive into the Toshiba and i get a blue screen of death saying harddrive is unbootable, Win 8 installation disks are needed.

I now wonder if any of my backups are any more than data archives of files rather than a full recovery method.

Two things, what build number does your copy of the recovery media report? Acronis last week updated the downloadable ISO to build 6528, though it still shows in your account as 6514.

Trying to boot an image of a recovered Tosiba machine in a Dell is most likely to fail, if I've understood your second post correctly.

When making the image, ensure that you have selected 'complete disk' rather than the options that show all the partitions. This is because many laptop manufacturers have hidden partitions and sometimes non standard disk structures for part some of them.

So, if you made the recovery media from within True Image, try downloading the recovery ISO from your account, burn it to a Cd and see if tha works better for you. The bluescreen on boot or possibly messages that no OS can be found can sometimes be down to the active partition flag either not being set on restore or the wrong partition is made active, making and restoring a complete disk image normally solves those problems.

Thanks for the comments, your help is appreciated. On the number 1) yes i made the recovery media from within acronis using the "Acronis Media Builder" which produced a true image version 16.0.6514.

I checked my account and it shows:
Product native bootable media
Build: #6514 Size: 385.56 MB
Date: 2013-04-04 00:00:00
The file that is downloaded is "ATIH2013_en-US.iso"
You are correct, the files internal to the ISO show a date of 5/21/13 rather than the 4/4/13 and the files are slightly different size, so I used nero to write the ISO to a CD.

I will need to update you tonight on the effectiveness of the boot CD on the Toshiba.

On the second part, I am using the Dell just as a clone device. I took the harddrive from the Toshiba and placed internal to the Dell but the Dell was forced to boot from the acronis CD. I never tried to boot the Dell from the Toshiba harddrive. I only did this because the Dell would boot from the acronis CD and the Toshiba would not. This allowed me to clone to a new harddrive connected externally to the Dell on the USB. You are correct, the Tosiba had a small hidden FAT32 recovery partition and a large NTFS main partition. I duplicated both to the new hard drive using the duplicate drive option and acronis appeared to work correctly and generated the 2 partitions on the new drive but when the new hard drive was placed into the Toshiba i got the blue screen of death.

I went back and reformated the entire harddrive as NTFS and cloaned only the Win 8 partition, not the FAT32 small Tosihiba recovery partition, using the same process of Acronis cd booting the Dell. Same thing resulted, new harddrive gave blue screen failure on Toshiba.

I know is sounds like a convaluted process but i was trying to get a fresh "out-of-the-box" image of my new toshiba laptop. Maybe the new boot disk will allow a more straightforward approach. I will update you tonight.

[update: failure] I tried the new downloadable ISO of build 6528 of the bootable media and unfortunately it acts identical. The toshiba will spin up the CD and try to read it and the BIOS "Toshiba" logo on the screen goes away but the screen goes black and the CD drive stops trying to read. The same cd in the Dell boots up and runs the Acronis boot menu.

So good idea and appreciate the suggestion but it appears Acronis has some compatibility issues with Toshiba.

SOLVED!!! kind of... Trial and error has revealed the problem. The Toshiba Windows 8 uses a BIOS system configuration for "Boot Mode = UEFI Boot". Acronis will not boot from the CD with the Bios in this mode. so
Step 1) Boot mode = CSM Boot
this opens up a 2nd option in the BIOs for SATA Controller mode
Step 2) SATA Controller mode = Compatibility
So this allows the computer to boot from the acronis CD and you can do a backup. But windows 8 will not boot unless the Bios is switched back to "Boot Mode = UEFI Boot".
To be honest, I have not actually had the courage to do a complete restore and see if the the restored image in "Boot Mode = CSM Boot" still works in "Boot Mode = UEFI Boot" or even works at all. But this is the only way to get the Acronis recovery CD to work.
I have given up on Win8 for the time being and have switched to WinXP and WinXP works in "Boot Mode = CSM Boot" and i have done full backups and recoverys multiple times and I know WinXP and "Boot Mode = CSM Boot" works with acronis.

Matthew Stratton wrote:

To be honest, I have not actually had the courage to do a complete restore and see if the the restored image in "Boot Mode = CSM Boot" still works in "Boot Mode = UEFI Boot" or even works at all. But this is the only way to get the Acronis recovery CD to work.

Matthew I'd not have marked this thread as SOLVED until you know that Restore works! Either you should await an answer from someone here who knows, or try it yourself and report-back.

I have a Toshiba s855-5170 which is similar to your model. I boot the acronis rescue media in uefi mode by pressing f12 repeatedly after powering on or restarting the computer and then select the odd (cd drive) in the boot menu.

Hi Matthew,
Thanks for sharing your solution. You've saved me :-)