Cannot boot after restore with tibx
Acronis 2020
Windows 7 Ultimate 1TB hd
I cannot create a bootable hard drive after restoring a tibx backup. The following problems have occurred with different hard drives and backups.
If I go into the bios I see the small window that says “select boot device” If I select “windows boot manager” Selecting this send me directly into the EFI shell.
However none of the EFI or UEFI commands work. For instance “Boot” returns “boot is not recognized as an internal or external command” Same result with the other shell commands I got from EFI shell command references.
Available boot options shown:
UEFI: built in EFI shell (Shown twice.)
Windows boot manager
Sata: WDC WD 30EFRX…….. My secondary data HD
Sata: WDC WD 1003FZEX…….. My Primary supposedly bootable HD
Sata:ASUS DRW-24B1st … My dvd drive
Enter setup:
Which kicks me into the bios settings screen.
Selecting boot options gives me one slightly different option… “[UEFI: windows boot manager]…. And does NOT show me the Sata: WDC WD 1003FZEX…….. My Primary supposedly bootable HD
Selecting … “[UEFI: windows boot manager] simply sends into the EFI Shell again.
Selecting the primary; hard drive directly – when I see it – gives me “MBR error 1” Press any key….
BTW, I had never heard of UEFI before TI 2020. It seems as if it is looking for some sort of file. Reading up on this makes it appear that dealing with UEFI is real technical.
NONE of this ever happened with TI 2018.
Help would be muchly appreciated. My swear jar overflowth.
Anthony

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Anthony,
Are you or did you use the bootable Recovery Media to restore with?
If yes are you using the WinPE or WinRE version or possibly the Linux variant?
Since you are running Win 7 I doubt that you are using UEFI.
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Anthony,
Sorry, we crossed posts. The situation you faced is that the Recovery Media is capable of formatting a drive either MBR or GPT. This is determined by how you boot the Recovery Media on your computer.
In your case your computer is capable of booting in either Legacy BIOS/MBR or UEFI Mode. When you booted the media you booted in UEFI Mode so TI assumed you were converting you disk from MBR to GPT and acted accordingly.
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I made a simple version using linux.
I may very well have booted the recovery disk under EUFI. Did I miss something in the TI2020 user manual? Not that I would have been aware of the significance of that.
I now need to scrub the disk back to a bare drive and try again booting the recovery dvd drive not under EUFI. Do I need to make another recovery cd? Might be a problem in that I only have TI2018 on this working drive. TI2020 is only available to me from the recovery disk I made when I first got TI2020. (Seems like a long time ago.)
Do you know if it makes any difference if the tibx file was originally created from a GPT partitioned disk?
Still mystified as to why I cannot make a bootable UEFI/GPT hard disk. As you noted, the cd/dvd drive boots nicely under UEFI.
I will post my results. I hope my hours of trial, now days and nights, helps some other lost soul.
Thanks,
Anthony
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I cleaned out a hard drive and rebooted TI2020 from the cd without using the UEFI boot option for my cd drive.
I located my most recent tibx file and went through the restore steps in the usual manner. As I specified the destination disk, which is a completely empty drive, I got the following.
A big orange bar at the bottom of the screen that says:
“Warning! After operation completion, operating systems will not boot from the destination disk in bios.”
The warning was correct. It won't boot. And examining the disk with Disk Director 12, I see that the disk was converted to GPT even though I booted the cd without using the UEFI boot option. I guess because the tibx file was created containing a GPT boot partition.
Conclusion: With older computers and Win 7 systems you might want to ensure that everything is MBR partitioning. AND DON’T BOOT ANYTHING USING UEFI BOOT OPTIONS.
Just a thought.
I still don't know why my bios will boot the cd using the UEFI boot option but fails with the hard drive.
I am just wondering if I could create a bootable HD in TI2018, then keep the boot partition intact and restore just the drive "C" partition from my tibx file using a TI2020 restore cd. I will let you know. LOL If that doesn't work I can only conclude my more recent work is long gone. I guess I can look into the drive and retrieve the data files, but all the apps etc are gone. Installation disks? What installation disks? LOL.
Thanks,
Anthony
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Enchantech,
" The situation you faced is that the Recovery Media is capable of formatting a drive either MBR or GPT. This is determined by how you boot the Recovery Media on your computer."
How did you know this? Is this information buried somewhere in one of the KB articles.
Thanks,
Anthony
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Anthony,
Well, you have a lot to learn here. Not sure that I can do that in this space.
I cleaned out a hard drive and rebooted TI2020 from the cd without using the UEFI boot option for my cd drive.
How did you "cleaned out" the drive? I am assuming you deleted the data on the drive with some method. If this is correct then it is likely the disk remained formatted as GPT.
I located my most recent tibx file and went through the restore steps in the usual manner. As I specified the destination disk, which is a completely empty drive, I got the following.
A big orange bar at the bottom of the screen that says:
“Warning! After operation completion, operating systems will not boot from the destination disk in bios.”
Since your disk was still formatted as GPT this Warning would be expected behavior given you now booted the media as Legacy BIOS/MBR.
I still don't know why my bios will boot the cd using the UEFI boot option but fails with the hard drive.
The Recovery Media used is what is booted and it contains UEFI boot code. It also contains Legacy BIOS/MBR code thus it can boot using either.
We know through these exercises you have performed that your computer can boot in either mode. This indicates that when the Recovery Media is attached and you boot to it and you select to boot UEFI it happily does so as everything needed is available to do so. Same is true if you select to boot the Recovery Media in Legacy mode.
Your computer bios setup however is set to do either one mode only. It is obvious to me that your Windows 7 install boots as Legacy BIOS/MBR. Thus when you point the boot order in the setup to the correct disk it boots as expected.
Most computer bios setups support both boot modes and this is controller by setting in the setup of the bios. Advanced setup options in the bios setup and then the Boot tab or section will show this setting. If that is set to UEFI First then the computer will look for UEFI bootable disk and boot such a disk if it finds one. Same goes for Legacy if it is set as First.
So, I would say that the image that was restored on the disk that is formatted GPT prior to you cleaning it would have booted had you changed your boot settings in your bios setup to UEFI first and then made Windows Boot Manager as the first boot Device in the boot order option of the setup.
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The drive was bare metal, then I made sure the disk was MBR as it was initialized and a volume created. I exited it completely and then looked at it again to be sure it stayed MBR.
TI2020 seems to assume GPT partitioning... or something. My first backups were of MBR partitions. Why they got changed to UEFI and GPT is a mystery except, as you mentioned, that the rescue media was booted using the UEFI boot option. I know both boot options were available for the CD drive but I was oblivious to the ramifications of using one or the other.
I consider this a failure on Acronis' part. If the disks and partitions are MBR, then KEEP them MBR. Some systems like mine may not get along with GPT and UEFI.
I have read about this stuff until my eyes bleed. There is no reasonable way to make my system boot UEFI. It is an older computer (MSI Z68MA-G45) and apparently is looking for UEFI files that don't exist. No such files show up in the bios listing for EFI files. (And TI2020 does not put them into the newly created GPT/UEFI boot partition.)
Time to consider a new motherboard and Windows 10. This is at heart a bios problem on my computer - and a TI2020 problem for ignoring the possibility of such problems.
In the meantime it is back to TI2018. I had no such problems with it. And it won't be TOO much of a problem getting most of my stuff back. Just a total pain.
Thank you Enchantech for your help.
Anthony
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Anthony,
Many users wish to convert older systems that traditionally booted Legacy MBR to a UEFI GPT boot system as there are advantages in doing so. The most popular is support of hard drives larger than 2TB by GPT. True Image attempts to make this as painless as possible.
You are correct that the bios of your motherboard is the root of the problem. It is a poor implementation in my opinion.
Since you provided your motherboard model I had a look at the Manual. In the BIOS setup screens there is a Boot section and in that section is the following:
UEFI Boot Drive BBS Priorities
- Boot Option
You can select the UEFI boot drive priorities in these Boot Option items.
This found in Section 3 page 22 of the manual. This is where you can select Windows Boot Manager as the boot device and boot a UEFI/GPT drive. If you care to do so in the future this should help get you there.
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Thank you again Enchantech,
We are all done here. I have gone over every line in the bios and there is no provision for booting UEFI hard drives.
I did discover that the dvd disk had visible EFI files in the boot folder. I guess that is why I could boot the cd. I also observed that the windows system boot folder had no such files. That may explain why the hard drive would not boot under UEFI.
But this is all way too much effort since I do have bootable drives created by TI2018. I lost some stuff but everything significant is still available one way or another. Three days of all nighters have made me crabby. LOL
Now I am upgrading to Windows 10 on one of these drives (with multiple backups if it works) and a brand new install on a new motherboard.
After this is all done i will give it another go at TI2020.
Thanks again,
Anthony
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