Restore RAID 0 Backup To Same Machine Fails
I'm running Win 10 on an ASRock Extreme7+ Z170 workstation with 2 Samsung 950 Pro nVME 512s configured as RAID 0 in the BIOS. ASRock has the Intel RAID code in BIOS so the RAID is bootable. When I attempt to do a restore the system does its restart and the initial recovery window comes up as if its starting the recovery. A minute later the system just reboots back to where it was. No error messages and no recovery. I can do individual directory/file restores with no problems at all. Does this situation need universal restore or do I need to go the MustangPE route?


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Dave,
Your issue is a bit complex. First, you need to understand that when you attempt a restore of the Windows System disk from within the Windows installed True Image GUI the computer must reboot into a Linux based environment in order to perform the restore task. Because of this it is recommended that restoration of a Windows system disk be performed with True Image bootable Recovery Media.
Second, the default Linux based recovery media does not have driver support for the Intel RST drivers necessary to access your raid 0 system disk. There is no way to inject or apply the necessary drivers to the Linux based media. The True Image Media Builder tool found in the Tools section of the application can create in addition to the Linux based recovery media a WinPE based recovery media. The WinPE media can have the necessary Intel RST drivers injected into the media so that True Image can work with your raid 0 array.
Using the Media Builder tool you would first create the WinPE media. Consult page 118 Section 11.1.1 of the documentation for instructions on WinPE creation. I am providing link to the documentation below: Note: You will need to create the media on a USB thumb drive.
http://www.acronis.com/en-us/download/docs/ati2016/userguide/
Once you have the WinPE media created make sure it will boot your machine. Once you confirm boot then you can perform the driver injection using the tool at this link: http://dismgui.codeplex.com/
You will need to download the Intel RST drivers for injection into the WinPE media. You can get them from the link below. Just select your installed OS and then look for Intel Rapid Storage Technology in the resulting list and grab the driver package.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z170%20Extreme7+/?cat=Download
Since the drivers com in an .exe package it will be necessary to extract them from the package in their raw format. You can use a utility such as 7zip to do this. Extract the files from the package into a folder where you will remeber that they are.
After the above and with the WinPE media created and that media attached to your machine locate the dismgui.exe file, right click on it and choose run as administrator. Once the app loads you will need to first mount the boot.wim file. Click on browse and navigate to the sources folder on the WinPE media and select the boot.wim file. Next, click on mount and wait for the mount to complete. Once completed, click on the Driver Management tab and click on Choose Driver Folder, naviagate to the folder where you extracted the driver files and select that location. Once selected click on Add Drivers. The dismgui app will acknowledge when the injection has completed.
Once that is completed you need to Unmount the WinPE boot.wim file so go back to the Mount Control tab and select Dismount WIM. The app will ackowledge when that is complete. You can close the dismgui app at this point and your boot media is ready to use.
Just boot to the WinPE media, have patience as it will take a bit to load and display the True Image app interface. Once there you can perform your restore as your RAID array will be displayed in the interface for selection.
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I'm running with a Skylake i7 4.0 and 64 GB RAM. I use VMWare Workstation rather heavily with Windows, Linux and ESXi hosts. Performance just plain smokes and I haven't even added a third 950 (yet). My previous config was based on high end SATA SSDs and an AMD 6 core processor. Really no comparison.
I'm still trying to get the USB stick loaded but am chasing Media Builder errors. I'm running Windows 10 so I installed the latest ADK to match my Win 10 build number. The ATI manual doesn't seem to cover the ADK stuff real clear.
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Basically once you install the ADK on your machine just run the Media Builder tool from True Image and it will create the boot media to USB for you. Look for the tools icon on the left side of the GUI.
I am also running Skylake with 32GB ram and 2 SM951 drives and I agree, it smokes. Post back with your progress.
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OK, finally getting back to you. I got the system recovered nicely using the USB stick and RST drivers approach you mentioned. What really got me good was not realizing quickly that the WinPE USB burn fails were caused by my USB sticks corrupted partition. The TI error messages given are rather vanilla and inconclusive. I just happened to try checking the sticks properties and saw that the capacity was UNKNOWN and it could not be formatted by the OS. Searched the web and found an article on how to use DISKPART utility to select the USB stick and then use the CLEAN command on it. That allowed me to go into Windows disk management and recreate the partition on it. The WinPe burn worked just fine after that. I still can't figure out where the USB stick got corrupted but it was when I was trying out all the Acronis USB recovery options. Acronis needs to do a basic check to see if the USB stick has a valid size and partition on it. Would have saved me hours of wasted time.
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Dave,
Glad you had success even though you had problems with the creation of the WinPE boot media on your USB thumb drive. Such issue has been reported here a few times in the recent past so I agree that True Image should check the integrity of a flash drive prior to attempting to write to it. I would suggest that you should express this to Acronis Development via the feedback tool in the Acronis app. You will find that featue in the help screen of the GUI, (look for the ? mark).
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Dave what's the size of the USB thumb drive?
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