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Acronis 2016 boot disc does not boot, while 2013 does (both -R DVD's)

Thread needs solution

Machines: Dell Optiplex 755
DVD player: Onboard & USB 
Acronis version: ATI 2016
DVD type: DVD -R
Storage medium: external HDD
 

Steps

  1. Put Disc in DVD player
  2. Boot from DVD player (in BIOS first position and manual)

Actual / issue

  • When using the Acronis True Image 2016 disc my machine tells me there is no boot medium
    • I tried the internal DVD player as well as an external one, both give me the same message
    • DVD looks clean, no scratches
  • When I use an older version (Acronis True Image 2013), I can boot successfully into Acronis and create/restore images from external HDD (DVD from the same spindle so same type, same age)

Expected

  • The Acronis 2016 boot disc to boot at least

Question

  • What am I doing wrong here?

 

0 Users found this helpful

Mark,

You will need to boot the PC into the bios and select the DVD as the boot medium by moving it to the first position in the boot order list.

You may also try the one time boot option of pressing the F8 key during the boot process of the PC and then selecting the DVD as the boot medium from the list that appears on screen.

I did both, resulting in a working bootable 2013 Disk.

The 2016 disk seems to try to boot, so making it go to the boot option is not the problem.

FYI I'm using the 2016 boot disk from build 6559

Others have had issue with certain media not working correctly.  Verbatim brand media recently has been a problem.  No idea why that is or what the problem might be. 

I can only suggest that you try a different brand DVD media or try a USB flash drive instead.  It seems that flash drives work best for the boot media.

Ditto to Enchantec.

Also, the boot media did change since 2014.  It now supports both 32-bit and 64-bit and is capable of both UEFI and Legacy boot.  The previous media in 2013 was Legacy only (I believe).   The system bios, as configured, may be having trouble detecting which method on the media to boot to now that there a different options available.  Using the bios boot override menu or one time boot menu (varies from motherboard to motherboard and bios firmware version), you should be able to specifically pick the UEFI or Legacy boot method and try each one to see if one works better than the other on your system.  If the system motherboard is UEFI capable, this is usually the default, but if you have a legacy/bios OS install, you would want to boot the recovery media in legacy mode.

Also, some motherboards (bios firmware) don't allow UEFI boot from DVD/CD but seem to work fine doing so with properly formatted UsB drives - I'd recommend trying creating a UsB drive and then attempting the one time boot/boot override method in both Legacy and UEFI mode to see if one works better than the other.

Hopefully this thread helps explain a little better: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/122101#comment-374851 

Enchantech wrote:

Others have had issue with certain media not working correctly.  Verbatim brand media recently has been a problem.  No idea why that is or what the problem might be. 

I can only suggest that you try a different brand DVD media or try a USB flash drive instead.  It seems that flash drives work best for the boot media.

I used the brand called "Imation".

I avoided a USB stick since I had issues in the past with certain (older) computers not recognizing certain USB stick brands. But I'll give it another try today since you mention this would most likely resolve the issue and also since we have no other disk brand to burn ^_^

 

Bobbo_3C0X1 wrote:

Ditto to Enchantec.

Also, the boot media did change since 2014.  It now supports both 32-bit and 64-bit and is capable of both UEFI and Legacy boot.  The previous media in 2013 was Legacy only (I believe).   The system bios, as configured, may be having trouble detecting which method on the media to boot to now that there a different options available.  Using the bios boot override menu or one time boot menu (varies from motherboard to motherboard and bios firmware version), you should be able to specifically pick the UEFI or Legacy boot method and try each one to see if one works better than the other on your system.  If the system motherboard is UEFI capable, this is usually the default, but if you have a legacy/bios OS install, you would want to boot the recovery media in legacy mode.

Also, some motherboards (bios firmware) don't allow UEFI boot from DVD/CD but seem to work fine doing so with properly formatted UsB drives - I'd recommend trying creating a UsB drive and then attempting the one time boot/boot override method in both Legacy and UEFI mode to see if one works better than the other.

Hopefully this thread helps explain a little better: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/122101#comment-374851 

Thanks for the info.
The machines I use are old, meaning these all have BIOS and no UEFI support.

What I did was the following:

  • Downloaded the portable version of Rufus (version 2.10.973) from https://rufus.akeo.ie/downloads/rufus-2.10p.exe
  • Create a bootable disk using: DD Image (I tried ISO first but that way it was still not bootable on my machines)
  • In the advanced settings I selected "Add fixes for old BIOSes

And voila, the USB stick was bootable, works like a charm now on all Windows machines. 
For people that want to know which brand USB stick I used: Kingston 16GB DataTraveler Micro.

Next step I need to figure out, how to create a bootable media for my OSX machines.

Apparantly the USB stick created only worked for Windows.

So to create a bootable media for OSX you first need to install the software on the machine.
And for the readers that are new to Imaging OSX just like me. with the bootable media you can only recover, not create (fine for now, but on windows you can go either way with the boot media.

Mark,

I had no idea you were talking about a Mac bootable disk initially since you're posting in the 2016 forum specifically which is Windows based.  There is a Mac forum thread as well, just FYI.

You are correct, bootable media is different for the Windows version (default LInux media or WinPE) and the OS X version (for Mac OS X only).  You are correct about the limitations of backup and recovery in OS X as well.  Must make backups from the Acronis applicaition in OS X and must restore using the bootable recovery media.  Not sure if this is a limitaiton/restriction of OS X or that the Acronis applicaiton on the Mac side just hasn't matured to that point yet.  With El Capitan introducing SIP (System Integrity Protection) by default, that may have some impact as well. 

As for the bootable media creation, if you can make a bootable USB using Rufus and the Acronis .iso, it should work just the same with the default media builder in Acronis.  I've used Rufus and like it a lot too, but I've had more success using the Acronis default media builder than the .iso to USB work-a-round with Rufus, iso2usb, or other similar tools. As long as you got it working, that's the main thing though. 

 

@Bobbo

You are right, I was first asking for Windows, that was my main issue. Once I had that working with the usb stick as suggested above, I also wanted to get it up and running for OSX, hence my switch of topic in this threat. But all works now so I'm good, this one can be closed.