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Acronis fails to see external USB drives since upgrading from 2015 to 2016

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Acronic True Image used to be great.  Been using it for years, however now since upgrading to 2016 it will no longer backup to external drives via USB.

What I've got is an internal 2 TB SSD SATA (in my laptop) and an external 2 TB HD SATA which I've plugged in via a USB to SATA cable.

This has always worked and while I'm still in Windows mode both Windows 7 and Acronis see the drive.  I then tell it to clone the drives with the automatic options and select the 2 drives, which forces it to go through the reboot process (as always).  It then spins for a long time showing one of the screen shots attached and then fails showing the other screen shot attached.  It doesn't matter what choices I make, it cannot handle cloning.

I have clones on this same hardware while I was still using the 2015 version of Acronis, but the 2016 version is a complete fail.

I've done 2 updates as per Acronis support.  No changes.

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Hello, Mark.

Have you tried booting your machine using Acronis Bootable Media? Please try doing this and see if the hard drives are detected.

Acronis has enough generic USB drivers that any external USB should be found on the Linux bootable media and/or WinPE bootalbe media.  What type of external drive and/or enclosure are you using?  Is it one that can be used with external power or without it, one that requies external power, or one that only uses USB power?

i'd guess that you either have a bad USB cable (mabye an older 1.0 cable as they all look the same), your USB ports don't supply enough power for an unpowered external drive, or you're using a bad USB extension cable or hub.  

I know you said it works in Windows, but it can depend on how the drive is being used.  For example, on my main PC at home, the front panel USB ports will power most USB drives without exeernal power, but not all of them. I used to find that during large data transfers, some of my spinning external drives would cut out and connect again, causing problems when I use my front panel USB.  When I replaced my spinning external drives with an SSD external drive, power consumption went down and the front ports work fine.  Otherwise, I shave to use my back USB ports for some spinning disks because they are directly onboard and have more power to offer, vs the front ones that use the USB headers on the board.

Otherwise, you may have a failing disk - not likely, but it's a possibility.  If the drive can't mount at boot, Acronis won't be able to use it.  If possible, try attaching it to another system and booting from the same bootable recovery media - can it see the drive then?  If so, it's most likely not Acronis, but something with your systme that the drive is attached to.