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Need rescue disk?

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Newbie question: I made an Entire PC backup to an external HD. Do I still need a rescue disk in case of catastrophe or will the system boot up from the external HD?  thanks

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mnp500, you will definitely need a Rescue Disk should you ever need to recover your Entire PC backup from your external HD.  

When you make an Acronis backup, you are creating a compressed archive file which is not bootable but which contains the backup image of the selected disks & partitions from your internal disk drive(s).

You should create and test the Acronis bootable Rescue Media a long time before you ever need to use it in ernest - you don't want to find any gotcha's when you are already up to your neck in alligators!

There are two types of Rescue Media - the standard media is based on a Linux Kernel in order to provide a bootable environment to recover your system, this should work with the majority of computer systems but not all!  Hence the need to test this.

The second type of Rescue media is Windows PE (Pre-installation Environment) which comes from installing the Windows 10 ADK on your computer - if you select Windows PE in the Acronis Rescue Media Builder application, it will prompt you to download / install the ADK.  Be warned this is a 3-6GB download!  The WinPE Rescue Media will work on 99.9% of all systems but by default, Acronis will only build the 64-bit version of this Rescue Media, so if you happen to have a 32-bit Windows 10 machine, it will not work.

See post: 127281: MVP Tool - CUSTOM ATI WINPE BUILDER for a MVP community tool that will allow you to build a 32-bit WinPE Rescue Media (on a USB memory stick).  Note: the 32-bit Rescue Media will work on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems!

 

    Testing the recovery media is very important. The standard recovery media (Linux based) supports no-raid disks (SSD/HDD), however many systems are now configured as raid (apparently enhances performance of SSD and NVMe drives) so you need to use WinPE recovery media and injuect the Intel raid drivers. The MVP tool simplifies the injecting of the raid drivers.

    Ian

    I also would state that rescue media should always be made - it is your saving grace and can be used in just about any recovery instance.  And yes, because you have a backup, you need the rescue media to restore the backup as Steve mentioned, your backup is in a proprietary backup archive (TIB - True Image Backup) that needs to be restored with Acronis... particularly rescue media.

    You can make backups from within Windows all day long.  However, please DO NOT EVER TRY TO RESTORE OR START A CLONE FROM WITHIN WINDOWS!!!!!!!!!!!

    Long story short, rescue media is much safer and makes no changes to your Windows booloader - under the right circumstances, that can leave your system unbootable and possibly unrecoverable (bios settings, encryption applied to the disk,e tc).  Rescue media does everything on it's own and makes no changes to the OS or bootloader - only use it to avoid unnecssary situations that can be avoided.  

    As Steve and Ian both mention though, do test your recovery media to make sure it can see all of your hard drives - it it does, you're good to go. If not, you need WinPE rescue media and the MVP tool is very handy for helping you do this (although you do need to install the Microsoft Windows ADK first to build WinPE with Acronis).  If you need help building WinPE let us know, but all you really need to do is download and install the Windows ADK (linked below)... it's kind of big at 3.4Gb (pick the top 3 options ONLY as that's all you need during the install). The MVP tool will do the rest for you and if you use Windows 10 ADK (whch can be installed on Win 7, 8, 8.1 and/or 10) you'll have the best driver support "out of the box", along with one of the most crucial drivers we include with the MVP PE builder - IRST (Intel Rapid Storage Technology) which will work for the majority of RAID controllers used in home computers, and/or newer computers that have the newer PCIE NVME hard drives (Samsung 950/960 Pro, 960 Evo, Toshiba 400, etc.)

    Thanks all! Very helpful.