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Lenovo desktop H50-00

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A client of mine purchased TI 2017 on his own and installed it on the above model Lenovo PC. He messed up his PC somehow and possibly caught a virus. When he tried to restore from a backup, that sent him into an endless loop of the Lenovo one key recovery, so he tried to run the one key full recovery. That kept him in the same endless loop. I took his machine and backup drive and tried to recover from an earlier backup that at first seemed to work, but once restarted, back into the same endless loop. I called Lenovo support and they said the recovery partition was corrupted and we had to buy the Lenovo recovery disk. What was most disturbing to me is that the support rep said that no backup system can ever work to do a full restore because the license was built in to the motherboard. This means that the only hope of recovery is to backup data and use the Lenovo restore disk or the one key recovery (if not corrupted), and then install the programs and add the data. Is this really true? If so it means that there is no point to having Acronis True Image for backing up.

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Sandy...you should be able to perform the recovery.  Here's some suggestions:

To perform the restore, you must boot rescue media the same way windows was installed.

Do you know how the system disk is formatted?  MBF or GPT/UEFI?  If GPT/UEFI, then you should use WinPE based rescue media and boot in UEFI mode.

If the system is UEFI and you used linux based rescue media, then the restore will not be successful.

If you are unsure of the disk format, you can remove the system disk, attach the system disk and the backup disk to another computer that has ATI installed...then perform the restore.

Please let me know if this was your problem.

Regards,

FtrPilot

 

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

Thank you. What do you mean by WinPE based rescue media? Where do I get that? I believe it is GPT/UEFI, but I disabled it in the BIOS for the restore. Why is Lenovo telling me it is not possible to restore from any backup program? BTW, I did not receive any email notice of your comment we we already purchased the Lenovo restore disks.

Sandy,

Rescue media is under tools.

RescueMedia.png

Then select 'Simple'

RescueMediaMethod.png

The rescue media being created will be WinPE and you can load it on a CD/DVD or a USB thumb drive.  If you use a USB thumb drive, it must be less than 32 GB in size and formatted FAT.  Also, the USB should be empty as all data on the drive will be erased prior to installing rescue media.

In the BIOS, you will need to enable UEFI.

Once this is done, it should work.

Regards,

FtrPilot

I have an Acronis account where I can DL the WinPE media builder for TI 2016, but this person, purchased 2017 and unless I can get access to his account, or put his license in my account, I cannot get the 2017 version. Is the 2016 WinPE rescue media builder forward compatible? On my own PCs I only have TI 2013

Short answer...yes.  The 2016 WinPE should work on a 2017 .tib file.  

Thanks, I will try to build it from the download, but no way to do it with your instructions since I don't have 2016 installed to any of my PCs.

It won't work because I don't have TI 2016 on my machine. Will have to do it the long and tedious way.

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

Thanks but I really do not want to upgrade what is on my PC with a trial version. Can the WinPE rescue disk even be made from a different PC? Is there an ISO file somewhere? Why doesn't Acronis provide it the same as they do with the regular emergency boot disk?

The WinPE rescue disk can be made on any computer that has ATI installed.

 

Thanks. I am creating it from another PC with Windows 10 and TI 2017. It wants me to install ADKsetup first. This is pretty convoluted and complicated to create a rescue disk. I have been successful before with the standard rescue disk on other PCs by disabling UEFI for the restore, but will try on the Lenovo with this. It is possible that something went wrong with the backup this person made, though I was able to retrieve files from it.

Yes, it is possible that the backup is corrupted.  You can check that by performing a validation.  You can do that with the Linux boot disk, or you can do that on the computer that you are using to build the new boot disk, but need the ADK setup.

Update: I can't make the winPE disk, I followed all steps but "failed to extract WinPE files". Now what? Ridiculous amount of time wasted!

Sandy,

At this point about the only thing I can recommend is to download the MVP PE builder at the following link:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B8uZDIFmupY7bTczX25KMHl2RVU

It is backward compatible with 2017 and 2016.  

As it turns out after much troubleshooting, the problems lie with the Lenovo. It has a defective BIOS and the only way to work with it is not just to disable UEFI, but to also put it into legacy default setup. Once done, it will boot from all bootable disks and I was able to do a full restore from the Lenovo disks. I also believe that TI will work flawlessly now as long as it stays in this mode. Note that Lenovo phone support was useless even when I asked them how to change the BIOS to legacy defaults rather then optimal defaults. Its crazy, but I got it done.

Sandy...congrats & well done.  Thanks for the feedback.