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Acronis 2017 Windows 10 : A BIG CONFUSION

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HI all,

SO i first used acronis back in 2010. Things were way simpler back then. Now after a long time of not being in touch with it , i happen to download acronis true image 2017 for my HP ENVY 15 notebook running on Windows 10. 

 I booted using the acronis recovery media , made a backup of my entire Harddisk, including HP recovery partitions (6 partitions in total, recovery and primary)

Now i happened to test the backup by recovering the entire harddisk, excluding the recovery partition( note while selecting recover i just choose the primary partition not recovery partitions) . Everything seemed to go well. But after recovery when u booted my computer i kept on crashing and going to recovery mode. So finally i had to recover by entire PC using inbuilt HP recovery mode.

So coming to my questions :

1. How do i backup my entire laptop HDD including/excluding recovery partitions? 

2. i had made separate backups of recovery+ primary , just primary and just recovery. So what is the correct way to backup a laptop having a disk with multiple

partitions?

Any help will be appreciated . Thanks

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Rahul, welcome to these user forums.

The process that you followed, as described above, should have been fine for both backing up all your HP Envy notebook partitions and then restoring these back.

The key point for when using the Rescue Media is that this should be started in the same boot mode as used by your Windows 10 OS.
See webpage: Check if your PC uses UEFI or BIOS to determine that boot mode.

There are two modes that can be used when restoring / recovering from a full disk backup, one is to do this as a disk recovery, i.e. you select the data to be restored at a disk level (which in turn will select all partitions), and select the target disk to restore to, again just selecting the disk and letting all the partitions be selected by default.  The second method is to restore in partition mode, which looks to be what you did, where you need to choose the individual partitions from the backup image, then select the destinations for those individual partitions on the disk drive, ensuring that there is sufficient space available to accommodate what you are recovering.

This is all described in the ATIH 2017 User Guide: Recovering disks and partitions which you can expand to see section: Recovering partitions and disks that describes the steps needed to restore / recover partitions.

hello Steve,

Thanks a lot for your reply. I followed the steps in your tagged posts. So it seems my PC has UEFI. Kindly help clear below doubts:

1. You say boot Acronis rescue media in UEFI mode. How do i choose mode? when i boot off my acronis RM it just displays 3 options : Start acronis/Boot manager/ shut down. I dont see any info about boot mode.

2. Once i am booted into the respective mode, how do i go about back up . What i primarily need is to backup just my primary partitions without touching the recovery partitions. My primary partitions are 2 , first is 960gb windows and another  260MB MBR i reckon. So while backing up do i just select these two partitions? or the whole disk? last time when i was unsuccesful i had backed up entire disk, and restored partitions individually excluding recovery, so does that cause an issue? do we get to restore exactly what we backup up?

Thanks , sorry for the lengthy post.

HI steve,

For your reference have attached screenshots of boot up and backup screens below:

KIndly let me know which all partitions need to be selected for backup ?

I would prefer not to fiddle with the HP recovery partitions , but is it possible to backup only select primary and mbr since its all one disk. thanks

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Luke, thanks for the screen shots.

The Boot image shows that the Acronis Rescue Media is starting automatically in UEFI mode as per the first line shown in the image, and this is fine as your second image shows an EFI partition.

In terms of the list of partitions and which ones to select, then the very minimum would be your NTFS C: OS partition plus the smaller EFI System Partition - they are essential to allow a full recovery to a new drive.

The NTFS Recovery D: partition looks to be the HP recovery one to enable you to reset the computer back to how it came from the factory - which can be useful if you are wanting to dispose of the computer but not leave any of your personal information on it.

The other Recovery partitions have all been created by Windows when upgrades have occurred, this can be for an upgrade from say Windows 8 or 8.1 to 10 or for the various upgrades that Windows 10 has provided such as the Anniversary Update.  These could be left out but if you were to get into a situation where you needed to do such as a Windows Startup Repair, then you would need to have a Windows Install DVD or USB stick, as this type of function is contained in these partitions.  As to which partition is which / which is the latest one, the image cannot show as you would need to look in Windows Disk Management and try to find which was added last.

My personal preference would be to backup the whole disk, including all these partitions - all the Windows Recovery partitions add up to around 2GB in size, which is small in the scheme of things.  

Take a read of webpage: How to Delete Recovery Partition in Windows 10/8/7 Safely? which may help you decide what to do about the multiple Windows Recovery partitions.