Acronis True Image Home 2011 boot CD destroys RAID5
I am booting my PC with CD bootable disk created by Acronis Home 2011 in order to image the system disk.
On my PC the system disk is the single HDD. All data is stored on RAID 5 array.
Problem:
When I boot the PC with Acronis bootable CD, Acronis removes the first disk from the RAID Array, reports errors related to RAID - see the attachment and stops responding (the Reset button has to be used).
Later I have to manually put the orphaned HDD back to array and wait for a day until the RAID controller rebuilds the HDD.
I expect another boot attempt with Acronis CD, before the rebuilt is completed, will remove another HDD in the array resulting in total data loss.
I tried with 2011 several times using built 6597 and 6696.
My PC has Gigabyte P35-DS4 Motherboard, the RAID controller is the one on the board - Intel ICH9R SATA RAID. 5HDDs form RAID 5, 6th port is not used.
The PC boots from the other SATA controller.
The operating system Win7-64 or Win XP is irrelevant as it is happening during boot to Acronis.
Acronis True Image Home 2010 was not doing this. I have made and restored many System drive images in this PC using Acronis bootable CD created with ATIH 2010.
Summary:
Putting is simply - I can't use Acronis 2011 on this PC because of high risk of data loss.
Acronis Home 2010 is fine.
Any ideas?
I lost RAID totally today - all HDDs were offline and could not be brought back, neither by RAID BIOS nor by Intel Windows utility. (I am not sure if this was caused directly by Acronis, but has followed the loss of HDD two days ago)
All data was destroyed. Luckily I did full backup yesterday (not with Acronis of course).
I have removed Acronis 2011 from my system with an intention never venture to this area again.
Re drivers.
How could Acronis Home 2010 work perfectly, bootable CD was seeing RAID correctly? - same hardware. I was saving the system drive images (not on RAID) there without any single issue.
I tried Acronis 2011 twice, two different releases - with identical results - loss of HDD in RAID.
Jacek,
As Scott says, this is a question of Linux drivers and kernel versions and support. If your CD cannot handle the Raid controller, your disks will appear differently.
Without user operations there is no risk the CD will affect the disk content.
If you write anything to the disks (like through a restore operation, or activating the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager), this will mess up the RAID configuration.
Here, step by step, what is happening.
1. The boot CD created from ATIH2011 windows session - create boot media.
2. The PC has a single System HDD (the one with Windows) + DVD RAM on the same SATA controller. On the second, Intel SATA controller, there is RAID5 array, where I keep all my data.
3. I boot from the Acronis 2011 Boot CD
4. We have Acronis splash screen, then command prompt-like screen with series of errors indicating errors in RAID. The boot hangs-up.
5. I press the PC's reset button, the PC boots. RAID controller BIOS screen says that RAID is degraded, the first of the HDDs is off line. (This is consistent behaviour). Also the HDDs count in the array is wrong. After rebuilding the failed HDD, everything seems to be back to normal, except from the last incident, when a day later whole RAID has disintegrated itself.
My original post has the RAID errors screen attached.
So, is there anything wrong with the above? ATIH2010 does not do it, although there is a splash of RAID messages for a fracture of a second, before the application starts. I need to capture this with a video camera to reed these errors. But otherwise I had no issues with ATIH 2010 boot from CD and I am doing this at least once a week for last year or so.
Pat, you have written: "If you write anything to the disks (like through a restore operation, or activating the Acronis Start-up Recovery Manager), this will mess up the RAID configuration."
This is a scary idea. Does this mean the Acronis is inherently dangerous to use on PCs with RAID? Cynically, shall there be a warning like - Make sure you backup your data before using Acronis Backup?
I was looking for an example where ATI would write something to the disk, because if you can boot with Acronis CD and it reads your RAID as separate disks, then if ATI writes something to the disk, this will mess the RAID.
Thinking of it, this is not a good example, and certainly doesn't apply to your case. Let's say this was a brain fart and leave it at this :-)
I am wondering whether your problem is not created by your resetting the computer as it is stuck on booting. I seriously doubt ATI directly writes anything on the disk that messes it up.
So we are back to a driver support issue in the CD.
Hello Pat, ATIH2010 boot CD reads my RAID as the single disk - as it should.
ATIH2011 removes one HDD from RAID and hangs up. The error message, saying that there is wrong count of HDDs comes up during boot, so the damage is already done.
Today I shared my observations with colleagues at work. They had similar experience with Acronis OEM version while booting servers from it. In these cases RAID HDD labels were removed by Acronis - whatever this means.
I have photographed that message flash just before ATIH2010 starts:
RAID set "isw_ebfaichjji_DATA"; was activated
The dynamic shared library "libdmraid-events-isw.so" could not be loaded:
"libdmraid-events-isw.so" cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Reading all physical volumes. This may take a white....
It takes a few milliseconds and Acronis 2010 starts - and seems to work OK.
I am not going to do any more experiments with ATIH2011, the risk of losing data is too high, besides recreating 1.5TB RAID5 takes a day.
I am using Acronis only to take an image of a complete drive - the system drive, as a sure way of protection against rogue installations and OS faults.
I do not use Acronis, nor any other commercial software, to back up the data. I use command line WinZip together with a batch files written by myself to drive WinZip. I end up with universally readable .zip files and no problems whatsoever.
Wow! I wouldn't think it could be possible that ATI breaks up a RAID configuration...
If you have registered your software, download the latest bootable media ISO and burn a CD with it. If one day you feel like trying 2011 again, this might solve your problem as it has a different linux kernel and drivers.
I have also been having RAID issues with ATI 2011, although mine was a twin RAID 0 array that I was trying to back up and every time I did so ATI 2011 just randomly shut down the PC with an instant power down. I have a separate thread on here and have had suggestions that it is a heat issue or faulty PSU but I just don't buy this as without ATI installed the problem goes away and the system is 100 per cent stable - and it only happened while the back up software was running.
I have since had to delete my RAID arrays (because of disk error issues and not because of Acronis directly - although having no reliable back ups was also a factor) and rebuild the PC from scratch with single volumes from manual backups. I am now wondering whether to risk re-installing ATI 2011 and see if it works with single volume disks. I am convinced there is a bug in ATI 2011 somewhere that is causing problems with dynamic disks, whether this is specific to Windows 7, 64 bit systems or the RAID controllers on Gigabyte mobos (mine is a Gigabyte X38-DQ6) I am not sure. However if it proves unstable with single volumes and the power down issue recurs I will also be dumping ATI 2011 for good.
Andyb01,
ATI 2011 doesn't support dynamic disks without the Plus Pack.
I am not sure you are really talking about software-based RAID (dynamic disks) or hardware-based RAID.
Neither - firmware/driver-based RAID using Intel Matrix Manager and yes I am aware that ATI requires the Plus Pack to support dynamic disks and I had that installed. Anyway - it's irrelevant now in my case as I have reverted to a non-RAID setup. Whether I will re-install ATI however is another matter altogether, I may just write it off as a lesson learned.
I have a similar issue. After i exit the Acronis TrueImage 2011 Recovery CD my RAID0 Members of my RAID0 Array (ICH10r raid controller) apears as unknown members (red). Luckily after a Shutdown and Reboot everything is green and in normal state again. I am using a Gigabyte ep45 ud3p (f10 Bios) an the ATI v14.0.0.6696 Version .
This sounds like a simple matter of the BootCD hardware drivers not recognizing the RAID properly -- once you reboot in Win, you're back the to Win drivers and everything is fine.
I started trying Acronis True Image Home 2011 yesterday and like it enough to buy it, but I would need a boot disc. Anyone know if one is available for purchase or if one can be burned (and how). Thanks for anyone's help!
If you buy the program you will get a serial number. You can use that to register your product onthe Acornis website. then you can go to you registered products page and download an iso file for bootcd. Burn that to CD and your down. Preferable is to install the program and use the function inthe program to burn a boot cd.
I started trying Acronis True Image Home 2011 yesterday and like it enough to buy it, but I would need a boot disc. Anyone know if one is available for purchase or if one can be burned (and how). Thanks for anyone's help!