Getting a "Restart Required" message during recovery
Acronis True Image Essential
Attempting to restore the C: drive on a Dell XPS 17 9710. Windows 10 Pro.
I am using bootable media because the drive is a RAID.
This has worked fine in the past.
Today, I am getting a "Restart required" message just as the recovery is beginning.
If I click "Cancel" it aborts the recovery.
If I click "Restart" I get an error message about a null pointer.
If I click "Ignore" I end up in a DOS box and nothing happens.
I tried rebuilding the bootable media, but that didn't help
One thing that has changed is that I have gone from a .tib with differential to .tibx with incremental.


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Thanks for the suggestions and the background info.
If the problem is locked files, it must have happened in the last couple of days, as it was working up til now.
I just checked, and it looks like Bitlocker had turned on again and encrypted the disk. I had turned it off previously. I've turned it off and decrypted the disk, but I'm waiting for some new backups of the unencrypted disk to be generated before I try again.
Your suggestion of wiping the target disk before the restore sounds a bit risky. What would happen if you wiped the disk and then found the backup was no good?
I'm also curious about the error message I'm getting when I click on "Restart." Something about a null pointer or somesuch.
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Tony, there is an assumption that the target drive may be already 'bad' given a restore was being attempted, along with the fact that the first action of any disk recovery will be to initialise the target drive wiping out any existing data.
The null pointer error could be caused by a number of reasons including encountering an encrypted disk unexpectedly.
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Steve - I'm going with Plan B.
1. Using Acronis, restore one of my backups to an external SSD.
2. Boot into Windows from the external SSD. Now, instead of some primitive "rescue" environment, I have all of Windows and its tools (and an easy-to-use version of Acronis). This step will test if the external drive will boot properly.
3. Boot into BIOS and change the internal drive from RAID to AHCI, making it easier for Acronis in the future.
4. Boot into Windows on the external drive.
5. Using Acronis, restore from the latest backup onto the internal drive.
I've already done steps 1 and 2.
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Tony, unless you are very lucky then your plan B will fail on step 2. as Microsoft does not normally allow Windows to be booted from an external USB device unless it has been correctly prepared to allow this in line with their 'Windows to go' feature!
This is where I use my own equivalent of the Acronis Survival Kit approach to create a bootable external USB HDD using the MVP Custom PE version of the rescue media.
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Steve - Just tried step 2 again this morning and it worked fine. Maybe it only works on this machine. There's a one-time boot menu that you bring up with F12.
The Dell XPS 17 9710 screen is 3840 x 2400 and this causes problems in the Acronis rescue environment, such as tiny dialog boxes that can't be made bigger, so their function is lost.
Today, I'll be beginning at step 3.
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Steve - Everything went fine. A few missteps - switching to AHCI from RAID didn't work, but no biggie. I killed the main partition using Disk Management to avoid the "Restart" message.
But I was able to do a restore from an external disk running Windows.
Question: there is a 16GB recovery partition on the disk. I specified a new backup in Acronis where I unchecked this one partition. Cut the size of the backup way down.
Will this cause a problem during a future restore?
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Tony, the 16GB recovery partition is most likely to be a factory recovery one intended to allow you to reset the PC to how it was delivered / shipped from Dell with whatever version of Windows it came with at that point.
You should be able to safely delete that partition if you have no intent of ever reverting back in that way.
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I have the same problem with a recenly created rescue medium. The medium was created with ATI 2021 build 39287
However when I use a rescue medium that was cretaed with an earlier version, which I created some time ago, the problem does not exist. So it looks like a problem that was created in a recent version of ATI.
It has nothing to do with the machune it is used on otherwise the older version of the rescue medium would not have worked.either.
Regards, Jan
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I have the same problem with a recenly created rescue medium. The medium was created with ATI 2021 build 39287
However when I use a rescue medium that was cretaed with an earlier version, which I created some time ago, the problem does not exist. So it looks like a problem that was created in a recent version of ATI.
It has nothing to do with the machine it is used on otherwise the older version of the rescue medium would not have worked.either.
Regards, Jan
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Same issue for me. As Jan said it's indeed the problem with ATI 2021 build 39287.
Issue appears if the ATI is installed directly on the machine or from bootable media (both Linux and Windows type).
It finally worked when I used older version ATI 2021 build - 35860.
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Steve,
I followed your advise by adding new GPT disk and it didn't work. Now I am dead in the water not able to load image to brand new laptop. I keep getting the same error. Now what??? Right now I have an brand new $900 paper weight. I am a network/sys admin and haven't used Acronis true image but a few times. I really need help here.
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Dear Tom Ybarrondo,
What kind of bootable media did you use? Was it WinPE or Linux?
If you used WinPE try to use the Linux one.
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Tom Ybarrondo wrote:Steve,
I followed your advise by adding new GPT disk and it didn't work. Now I am dead in the water not able to load image to brand new laptop. I keep getting the same error. Now what??? Right now I have an brand new $900 paper weight. I am a network/sys admin and haven't used Acronis true image but a few times. I really need help here.
Tom, welcome to these public User Forums.
Sorry but it has been over a year since I last dealt with this forum topic so really need to start from the beginning with any new issues being raised?
What exactly are you trying to do here and how are you trying to do it?
What actions have you done so far?
What machine did your backup image come from and how similar is that source machine to the brand new laptop you are trying to restore it too?
Are you working here from a Windows desktop environment using Acronis, or are you booting the brand new laptop from Acronis rescue media? If the latter, what type of rescue media, i.e. how was this made and where was it made?
Note: it might be easier and less confusing all round if you opened a new forum topic and also told us what version of Acronis software you are using?
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I have a similar problem.
I have tried to boot from a USB built with the Acronis Rescue Media but Windows 11 does not appear to allow boot via USB.
Instead, I loaded Acronis and attempted to restore my C: drive from whole of PC backup on an external hard drive. I received the following message: "Computer restart is required. Note that hte operation will be canceled if you choose not to restart your computer now".
I restarted the computer. It simply reloaded Windows 11 and Acronis was nowhere to be found.
The upshot is that I cannot restore my C: drive either from Rescue Media (USB) or via Acronis back up on an external hard drive. Surely this should be simple.
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If you are doing recovery from within Windows, then on restart it should load a temporary Linux installation; it could be that the security settings in your BIOS/UEFI only allow Window to boot. The same settings would stop USB media from loading. Without knowing the hardware you are using, it is difficult to be of more assistance. When attempting to use USB media, it is possible that the shut down settings do not actually shut down the computer; instead it is put into sleep or hibernations mode. If so, on pressing the power button, you will not get an option to boot using USB media [on Gigabyte mother boards you press F12 to do so - the key required should be in the user guide for the PC or motherboard].
Ian
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Thanks. I have a Dell XPS desktop. I was able to create a new USB rescue media using Acronis (I think the USB rescue media I had used previously was out of date or had some other problem), and I rebooted through that to restore the backup. Nonetheless, I still don't know why I couldn't restore via Acronis within Windows.
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Daniel Clough wrote:......, I still don't know why I couldn't restore via Acronis within Windows.
It is perplexing; if recovering a system drive, there is a risk that things will go pear shaped if done from within Windows. Doing so with recent versions/builds of ATI/ACPHO seems to be less prone to going pear shaped; I have done so myself - but I make sure of have access to multiple up-to-date backup (cloud, NAS, USB drive) before doing so. It is always safer to do recovery using recovery media.
Ian
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Tom Ybarrondo wrote:Steve,
I followed your advise by adding new GPT disk and it didn't work. Now I am dead in the water not able to load image to brand new laptop. I keep getting the same error. Now what??? Right now I have an brand new $900 paper weight. I am a network/sys admin and haven't used Acronis true image but a few times. I really need help here.
I had the same problem, wiping the disk in acronis doesnt work, but try to do a fresh reinstall of windows first on that drive and try again the recovery via the acronis boot.
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