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External drive not recognized by Acronis Rescue Media

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I have booted from a USB flash running Acronis Rescue Media and I am having difficulty getting it to recognize my external backup containing the .tib files.

The external drive is a Western Digital My Book 8 TB 3.5" formatted NTFS and GPT. I am wondering whether the GPT file system is compatible? Why won't it recognize the external drive?

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I assume that the My Book is USB connected. Drives like that are getting into the territory discussed here recently. (Someone tried using a multi-drive USB array.) They may break the rules that allow it to show up in the BIOS.

It may be better to stick to bog standard, old school drives for things like this. Leave those big exotic, and expensive, beasts for environments where you can install all the drivers and stuff they need to work.

 

David, welcome to these User Forums.

Which version of the ATI 2017 Rescue Media have you built and used here?

The standard Rescue Media for 2017 is based on a Linux distro so this may have an issue with your 8TB GPT / NTFS drive, but if you create the alternative WindowsPE version of the Rescue Media then I would expect this to work fine.

Note: for the Windows PE media you will be prompted to download the Windows ADK which is a large download of around 3GB - once downloaded, you only need to select the top three options to be installed, the other options are not needed for the rescue media.

Thanks Steve. I'm just in the process of downloading the ADK. Are these the top three options you were talking about?

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Moving a step ahead, I'd just like to understand better the purpose of Acronis Rescue Media versus Universal Restore. My understanding is that Rescue Media will allow me to boot to a temp windows environment and copy a saved .tib image to a new drive, while Universal Restore will allow me to make that drive bootable. Correct?

Do Rescue Media and Universal Restore need to be saved to separate flash drives? And if one of them is a WindowsPE version, do they both need to be?

David, yes to the screen shot showing the ADK install options, the top 3 only are needed.

Universal Restore is not needed to restore a saved .TIB image to a new drive, you just need the Rescue Media for that task.

Universal restore is only used when migrating your Windows OS to new hardware in a new computer, so where you have a new motherboard, CPU etc.  AUR prepares the migrated OS to work on that new hardware by setting generic device drivers as provided within Windows plus will request if there are any devices which need new drivers in order to boot Windows.

 

Success! The WindowsPE version recognizes the external drive.

I tried restoring a .TIB image to a fresh drive and am able to boot from it. The only issue now is that since the fresh new drive is larger than the original, it seems to have created a partition to match the original.

So I have two partitions on the new drive. One that holds the restored .TIB and the other is just empty space. Is this normal? Is there a way to have just one partition that makes use of the full size of the drive?

Yes this happens frequently. The solution is to use a partitioning tool to adjust the partitions. Many of us favour Minitool which is free. I used it recently when I did a restore to a larger SSD. It is possible to adjust partition sizes during the recovery but I find it a little tedious, hence the use of a partitioning tool.

Ian

David, glad to hear that the WinPE did the trick for you. Ditto to Ian about using MiniTool Partition Wizard free for resizing.