True Image Home 2012 Bootable Media does NOT work with Intel RAID 5!

I do not use Acronis 2012, but use 2011 and have used all previous versions back 5 or 6 years. I have learned that the Linux-based recovery media Acronis provides may NOT include all the necessary Linux kernel drivers to accomodate your specific hardware configuration (not surprising). The best way around this is to get the Acronis Plus Pack and then build a custom WinPe based recovery Media that includes all the drivers you need to interact with your hardware. This is a better choice in my opinion because it runs the Windows 7 kernel and the Windows-based True Image program, not a Linux based version, and my experience shows that if you are doing backups to and restores from network based backup files, performance is much better.

I have argued that since the Linux Recovery Media does not provide universal hardware support, the plus pack component that allows creation of WinPe based recovery media should be built into the base True Image product... not an extra cost add-on.

Word of caution to everyone using a backup/recovery program, though... ALWAYS test bare-metal backup and restore (i.e. disaster recovery) with any new release or update BEFORE you actually need to rely on it to recover your precious data... or you may be in for a nasty surprise when you least can afford it.

Amen to all of that. Without a pre-tested "rescue disc" that is fully functional for your own system and its storage devices, all the backups in the world become totally useless just when they're needed most urgently.

Just a note for those who may be familiar with creating WinPE builds. The TIH Plus Pack is not absolutely essential. By using tools like WinBuilder ( http://reboot.pro/ ) it actually is possible to use the contents of the free Acronis BartPE download with PE2 (Vista) and PE3 (Win7) sources as well as with a PE1 (WinXP) source. In fact, it's even possible to use it for creating Win7x64 PE builds just by switching a couple of driver files and including the appropriate WOW64=1 entries in the WinPE registry's system hive.

I'm surprised that Acronis hasn't taken the leap themselves. Bart PE1 support is way out of date, but maybe not so surprising from their own narrow "upgrades and addons" marketing perspective. Can make my own WinBuilder scripts available if anybody wants 'em.

The last Build (6942) of TIH 2011 (with or without Plus Pack) has the same problem; in RAID 5 the Partitions/Disks inside the RAID are not listed. (With TIH 2011, you must use a Rescue-Disk from Build 6868; see: "27199: Intel (physical) 4 disks RAID5 not working with ATI 2011 with Plus Pack (build 6942)".)

I came back to try acronis 2012 after using ghost for the last two years because of all the problems with the original 2010 release. I put in the boot disk and it totally hosed my 4 disk RAID 5 Intel configuration. It said the disk count in the array was wrong and when I rebooted without the Acronis CD boot disk, I got a missing operating system error. I went into BIOS and found a degraded array and opted for a rebuild. The system came back up and is now rebuilding. Somehow, the cd boot disk added an unknown port/disk to the array and I get have what used to be a 4 disk array indicated that it is a 5 disk array with one missing. This is really strange since all by ports are used and this places 7 ports on a 6 port controller.

I will let you know what happens, but I am not happy that a CD ROM boot disk can so screw up my array.

Follow Up. Well I wasted a day recovering my computer after acronis hosed the RAID configuration. I was able to rebuild the array. Except that when I powered down, the Intel RAID manager marked all disks bad with a parity error. After a lot of web searching and convincing myself the problem was not with the Western Digital hard disks, I found some advice on removing all disks from the controller. I booted up with only one disk at a time and they came back online. With all four disks connected, they came online with a parity error on two disks. Another reboot, finally accepted the array and I was able to get back to my original configuration.

I am still not comfortable that everything is fine, so I am going to do a backup using ghost, verify I have a working WindowsPE boot disk to recover and rebuild the array in ghost if I have a problem, and then run verify on the array using the Intel Storage Manager. I did find a utility-verifymarker.exe from intel that supposedly sets all the disks to "healthy."

At any rate, someone really screwed up at acronis. How could running a CD ROM boot disk generated by ATI 2012 cause this much trouble? I did just load the plus pack which creates the WinPE disk and associated drivers. Why this is not part of the basic package is beyond me. It is the standard option in ghost, but a totally seperate program in ATI. I was getting bored with the fact that Norton has not updated ghost in two years, but ATI 2012 did not move the ball forward.

Still unsure if I am going to ask for $19.95 back. This was way to painful an experience.