True Image 2016 doesn't work with SSD PCI-E card (Revodrive 3 X2)
Hello!
I have a high-end machine which has (as it's primary drive) an OCZ Revodrive 3 X2 SSD PCI-E card. This card has worked perfectly since it was installed back in 2013.
I installed Acronis True Image 2016 on the machine so I could take a full system disk backup, however apparently the product doesn't much like SSD PCI-E cards at all. When I boot into Acronis (F11) I go through the steps of creating a backup but get a message saying the disk has errors. If I continue the backup, it fails part way through with a read error.
My PCI-E SSD shows it's still got a lifetime of 98%. ChkDsk does indeed find cluster errors - however, this is apparently something ChkDsk does with PCI-E SSDs. Even after running the ChkDsk and the errors being fixed, True Image still won't take a backup.
Furthermore, the differential backups I've taken in Windows won't restore either. The restore process reboots and goes through the process - but fails before the restore begins and returns to windows.
True Image used to be a good product - it's a little sad that I can't get it to work regardless of what way I attempt to do things! According to the tools provided with the Revodrive - there is NO issue with the card.
Is there a patch or something that allows this product to be used with a PCI-E card, or am I doomed to have a useless product?
Cheers,
p.s. If any of you have Whole Disk Encryption and you want to install the Acronis bootloader - DON'T. Obviously both WDE and Acronis need the MBR to be able to boot their products - but neither product will warn you prior to installing their code, that the MBR has already been modified. This was a mistake I made recently and because True Image didn't work properly for the backup, I was unable to rescue anything from the mess. Thankfully I take other backups to the cloud. At this level, both Symantec and Acronis should know better in terms of warning about potential damage caused by this MBR mechanism being installed.
/End_Rant
The default boot media is Linux based and lacks drivers for your hardware. You should create WinPE boot media that should have native driver support or allow you to inject the appropriate drivers to successfully use the product.
Thanks very much for the replies. I'll give the WinPE approach a shot. I suppose I just got used to TrueImage working with any disks. Like... in the olden days, disks were all the same so it was easier. :)
Whats your thoughts on my PS (the MBR issue). On the one hand, as a computer guy I should know better than to try to stuff two payloads into the MBR - but I totally forgot that whole disk encryption needs it to boot. On the other hand, I think products should tell you if the MBR looks non-standard for a windows build, when trying to install the boot manager. That small warning could save people a lot of grief.
I've since made a WinPE disk with my SSD drivers integrated and it worked a treat. Managed a whole backup without moaning about bad sectors. Fantastic!
Now that I have a working WinPE image, is there any way to replace the one that loads with the startup recovery manager? So I don't need the WinPE data stick anymore?
Simon, I used to use the ASR (F11 on boot) method which altered the MBR but after having a lot of difficulties on more modern systems using UEFI, GPT / Secure Boot, I found that the standard Linux recovery environment could not detect the internal drives thus ASR couldn't either as used the same Linux media.
Since that time I have taken the alternative approach of adding options to the BCD menu which avoids any need to modify the MBR and works well in both environments (MBR or UEFI).
I like Steve's recommendation.
Alternatively, as I don't like to change the BCD menus on my main OS unless I have to for dual boot OS, you could image your bootable media drive and push it to another partition on your main hard drive (at the end would be best for an OS disk though).
Then, when you reboot or power up, you could just press F12 (or whatever your system uses to get to the manual boot override menu) and boot directly into that parition when needed. The key though, is you have to create yoru bootable media to a flash drive first, then take an image of it and then push that image to a new partition on your internal drive. Be careful not to accidentally overwrite the wrong partition when you push the image back though ( if you do go this route instead).
Yeah that's also a good shout. I'll look into that - would save me some issues.
Really appreciate your time folks. Thank you kindly. Apologies for the initial grumpy post. I wish IT worked the way it did back in the sinclair spectrum era.