Acronis Startup Recovery

ASRM (F11) is LInux based.  If it does not have the necessary drivers for your system (especially if you have the SATA mode set to RAID in the bios), it most likely won't work.  Other physical bios settings and configuraitons can prevent third party bootloaders from launching - for instance, if you have secure boot enabled, or if you don't have legacy/CSM mode enabled on a UEFI bios.   

Personally, I do not use the F11 ASRM feature as it overrites the Windows bootloader temporarily and replaces it with information to boot into Acronis.  If Acronis fails to boot (as in your case), and the change is unable to be reversed, you risk the possibility of the windows bootloader not being replaced.

ASRM (F11) is a convenience feature, that works for some, but not others based on how their bios is configured (in most cases).  However, using a USB flash drive too boot to recovery is almost just as convenient (especially if you leave that USB plugged in to a port on the back of a computer or have it readily available).  It also alleviates risk of an possible corruption to the Windows bootloader.  

This is just me and my personal recommendation (however, many MVP's will agree), you will be better off creating a USB flash drive with recovery media and booting that when you need it.  I have used this method for the last 4 years and have been very happy with it.  You will find that other competing backup products have similar features like ASRM, but also offer recovery media too.  The recovery media is the end-all-be-all for your backup recovery and should be kept on hand as it is the most reliable method (and completely non reliant on your existing hard drive, OS, etc).  

It's worked in all previous versions of True Image.  I've never had a problem with True Image until this version.  Besides the F11 ASRM not working, I've had to delete my Secure Zone in order to do backups.  I've uninstalled and reinstalled 2017 before I realized it was the Acronis Secure Zone that just wouldn't allow a backup to written to it.  Really frustrating to have used a software probably since the 2009 version (maybe even before) and now have all of these problems.  Beta testing should be done before requiring someone to pay.

Randy,

There was a 2 month beta testing that was open to all users - did you participate at all? There is also a free 30 day trial available for all new versions, so one is not required to pay to test.  Those that do pay, also have an additional 30 days to request a refund if not satisified with the product for any reason.

I never use ARSM or Secure Zone - two features I personally feel can be damaging to an OS and I can't personally see the usefulness of secure zone since it is just another parition on the drive that offers no additional security or compatibility outside of Windows (it's just a fat32 partition with a different ID than what Windows expects).

I get what you're saying - it should just work.  Perhaps the ugprade didn't go well.  Perhaps there is a bug - I believe that some others are having issues with ASRM as well. 

If you do keep the software, you now have a full year of technical support and would recommend you create a ticket and work with Acronis directly to see if they can help resolve it.  This is a user forum and we help where we can, but even those of us with MVP badges are only volunteers and are not Acronis employees or have the resources regarding the software programming and/or debugging that goes on within the company.  Always happy to try and help, but there is only so much that the user community can provide for some of these types of issues.  Take advantage of the technical support now that it's available. 

Randy, like Rob in his comments above, I too no longer use ASRM - I always used to with some of the earlier versions but I stopped doing so over a year or more ago when I found that it caused drive letters to be assigned to my hidden partitions for some unknown reason.

I have also stopped using the ASZ but for different reasons though I do have this created purely for testing purposes.  With the ASZ I stopped using this because of the lack of control over files held with it - this was prompted when I wanted to recover one of two OS partitions for a dual-boot system and I simply could not identify the backup file for this.  I have since found another problem with using the ASZ with regard to file names where Acronis starts using totally cryptic names for the files and also doesn't obey the automatic cleanup rules when multiple incremental files are stored - this problem was still present when I was testing the ATIH 2017 Beta.

My preference today is to create my own separate partition in which I keep my local backup images, separated in folders (not allowed in ASZ) and completely within my own control.

I guess I'll just have to change the way I've used the software for years.  I've favored the ASZ because I bought into the idea it would better protect the backup if my computer got infected with a virus or malware.  Also, I preferred the drive not showing up with a drive letter and showing up in My Computer.  I figured if it was hidden and couldn't be written to, it would be safer.

As for ASRM, I am constantly testing beta programs (such as Norton Security) and frequently restore my system to a pre-beta state.  It was just a matter of convenience to press F11 and go from there.

As for trying out the beta version or trial version of 2017, maybe I should have.  But since I've always been pretty much pleased with previous versions, I trusted that Acronis had their act together.  Live and learn!

Thanks to every one for the work arounds which I was definitely aware of since I am a long time user of the program, it's just that I prefer released programs to work as advertised and was really upset to wake up this morning and find that my scheduled backup didn't happen as planned.  All is well now, just not the way I'm used to or wanted.

Randy, I fully understand your response and for many users this is completely valid, however, as Rob mentioned previously, using ASRM is fine providing your system is able to boot into the Linux environment that this creates, and with more modern systems using UEFI & Secure Boot, this has become more problematic.

For ASZ, I would not recommend going to ATIH 2017 at present because there is a problem that is preventing any backups writing to the ASZ which Acronis is still investigating - I can reproduce this problem on my own system - so ASZ currently unusable with 2017!

Please see the attached PDF document I created some months ago to document using EasyBCD to add boot manager entries for ISO files which would give you a Metro menu choice to boot into the Acronis Rescue Media when starting the system as an alternative to using ASRM.

Well I'm making a little progress.  I got ASRM (F11) to work.  After making a USB for the recovery software, I decided to reboot and make sure everything worked as advertised.  I noticed that choosing the 64bit version of True Image resulted in the program not starting as originally noted above.  Choosing the 32 bit version worked great, so I chose to create the ASRM from inside the 32 bit version and now F11 works fine.

Now my new question is, since I have a 64 bit PC with Windows 10 Pro 64 bit installed and making weekly updates, will the 32 bit version of True Image work correctly if I need to restore a backup?  Don't really want to test this out until I'm confident it'll work!

Randy, you can use the 32-bit program on both 32 bit and 64 bit systems without any issue.  The Rescue Media is working outside of Windows so this makes very little difference in reality except for not using the total capability of the processor.

I did a restore on a spare Windows 10 64-bit system just the other day using the 32-bit program - I tried initially to do this using the 64-bit program but this got about 90% through then told me there was a problem with the backup image.  Using the 32-bit program the restore completed successfully including validating the backup image first.