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Recovering from a main drive crash

Thread solved

Good Evening,

Last week, I lost my main drive.  Fortunately, I back up automatically every Sunday.  I replaced the 3 TB Barracuda drive with a 4 TB solid state drive.  So now what I have is a basically clean drive with  Win10 OS and Firefox.

So now I want to recover the data from the backup drive.  I downloaded and installed the latest Acronis build.  For some reason I need to explore, the backup drive isn't recognized in the tree by the computer. 

I also installed Acronis on an older computer to at least try to make sure all my files are there.  The older computer recognizes the backup drive and I can see the contents.  That machine also runs Win10.

So here's the issue.  When I start Acronis on the old computer and go to recover, it tells me that I don't have any data and that I need to run a backup with fresh data in order to recover anything.  It's almost like Acronis doesn't recognize that there is already a drive with data on it.  My thought is that in the recovery process, Acronis should ask for a drive letter and armed with that information, should recognize that there is data that has been backed up to the portable drive.

Can any of you good people out there suggest a workaround so that I can at least see if I have all my files. And yes, if you were wondering, I will uninstall the Acronis software from the old computer once I get this mess straightened out.  And yes, I did RTFM and am familiar with how the restore should work.  But it isn't for some reason presently unknown to me.

TIA for any help you may be able to provide.

Regards,

Paul Veltman

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Paul, if you are attempting to restore your main disk drive with Windows OS and applications on it, then you need to do this by booting the PC using the Acronis bootable rescue media, not by attempting to do this from with Windows with the Acronis GUI application.

The first step is to create the rescue media on the computer where you want to do the restore to the replacement 4TB drive, i.e. the machine it is installed in.  Use the option to create the 'Simple' version of rescue media which uses Windows PE and captures device drivers from the Windows Recovery Environment on that system.

Next, check what BIOS mode your system is using to boot into Windows, ideally for a system with a 4TB drive, this should be UEFI and not Legacy (which has a limitation of max 3TB for drives using MBR scheme).

You can do this check by running the command: msinfo32 from Windows and looking at the BIOS mode value shown in the right panel of the report it creates.

Test booting the PC from the Win PE rescue media and with the storage drive connected, confirm that you can see the target 4TB drive and also the backup image you want to restore.

If all looks good, then you should be able to do a disk level recovery of everything that was backed up from the failed drive to the new one.

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 69472: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: how to create bootable media

KB 69427: Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

When doing the restore of your backup, this needs to be done as a Disk & Partition restore and at the top Disk selection level.

Please see forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document which shows a step-by-step tutorial for doing this type of recovery / restore.