Restore fails to boot. I have tried a thousand things.
Hello all....thanks in advance for any help that may come of this.
I have a workstation that is critical to my work. It has been extremely stable and is about 6 years old. The original system disk was a RAID5 made from 4x HDD's. At the time it was a great way to get some speed and have a touch of redundancy - a single failed drive and the system stays running. Well, that day came back in August - a disk in the RAID failed and I replaced it with a new one. It reubuilt as expected and about 2 weeks later, another failed. This time, the rebuild failed and the disk was dead forever. No big deal, I have been backing up with Acronis. No worries.
I had thought that I had local backups on my NAS, but there was an error of some sort so I did not have a local image. I did, however have an Acronis Cloud backup. Perfect - 60 hours to restore from the cloud, but it was restored - sort of.
It did not boot, just an endless restart. I have been researching and fiddling with this since August with no complete recovery yet. The software on the machine and it's configuration is very difficult and extremely expensive to re-install. Some of it is not even available anymore at any price. Restoring the orginal configuration is all I am interested in doing. A brand new computer with a fresh install is not helpful in this case.
I am not a true IT professional, but I have been a professional programmer since the 80's and very familiar with most OS's, programming lanuages, command line, etc. Not a beginner, but this is definitely outside of my skill set.
So far: ( I have done so many things, I cannot remember including 3 fresh restores at 60hrs each to reset the effort)
Windows revcover DVD - no help.
SFC /scannow - no errors
CHKDSK - no errors
bootrec sequence - cannot find Windows. Renamed BCD file and did a rebuild where it finds Windows and is susccessful - but still cannot find Windows after bootrec /scanos is run.
Initially, I got a BSOD error that it could not find the boot partition. I changed the BIOS from AHCI to IDE and not it finds the partition but has a stop errror furthur into the boot process C000021A which is a fatal error with winlogon or CSRSS.
On an earlier attempt - I restored a registry backup and the system booted, but with a number of hard to expalin issues - could rename folders, could not create a restore point, some software worked and others failed, could not boot into safe mode, and others things. Nuts.
Anyone have a guess where to go next?
Thank you for taking a moment to reply.....
At the moment - I do not have enough drives to build a RAID. The thought was that I restore to a single SSD - which is faster than the original RAID config. I could buy some cheap HDD's just to do the restore if it would really help. Do you suppose it is worth trying? I would have to order some drives, configure them, and then do the 60+ hours of cloud restore. Totally worth it if it works - but it feels like a hunch.
Clearly, I have been chasing my tail for quite some time. Willing to try most anything - restoring to a new RAID is a big time committment though. Seems like getting all the way to a BSOD STOP 0xC00021A is very close to a successful boot. If I can get it to boot, I can clean up a lot of stuff and migrate to the SSD. If it seems impossible or will take another 40 hours of fiddling and hacking - the option to restore to a RAID may not be so bad.
I have no real undersstanding of how big the issue is.
EDIT:
Win7 Pro 64
Asus P6X58D Premium
Intel ICH10R RAID controller
24GB RAM - ATI FirePro 8800
Just found a disk that I am using as a test to build a RAID and restore to it. See if it makes a difference. Fingers crossed.
Another setback -
I setup a new RAID in my machine to perfectly mirror the original configuration. After about 14hrs of cloud restore, the system crashes. Even though there is the Acronis USB in the machine (that it booted from), it asks for a USB drive on a console screen. I insert another USB drive and it just sits there - keyboard locked.
Then the system restarts. The USB stick has an empty log file. This software is comedy gold! Useless. It is also totally beyond my understanding why I cannot download the image file to my local NAS once so that I don't have to wait 60hrs for a cloud restore everytime I feel the need to start over. This is feeling like a lost cause at this point. Every approach to get this restore leads to a dead end and every dead end represents huge numbers of hours wasted.
As an experiement - I tried Paragon Hard Disk Manager 15 ($50 consumer software) to image three of my other computers. Win7, 8, 10 and they all restore without any issues. Does Acronis work at all? Is it even worth continuing the fight on this?
I had a similar issue with a recent restore from the Acronis Cloud. The ability to downlad as a Image would be great. The image could be created on the server an an email sent when it is ready for download.
Ian
Carlos, contact technical support to see what they say. This is the type of issue they need to be aware of and hopeuflly they can help you directly since they have ability to look at the Cloud stuff, that we cannot here in the forum.
If you're using RAID, what type of USB are you using - the default Linus one or Windows PE? If you're not using Windows PE and can make one on another computer, that would be my recommendation. Unfortunately, that requires you to have the Windows ADK and Acronis installed to build the WinPE though as Microsoft does not allow the distribution of WinPE directly.
If you have the possibility, build it with our MVP tool: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/127281
I think you'll find it much nicer and more handy than the default Acronis media builder (on its own).
I have done chat support 3 times with no progress. In general, they seem to have a habit of disconnecting me, and talking down to me (ie "You should know that TrueImage is a consumer product.....". Not only was there no technical progress, it was a rotten personal experience on top of that. I have worked side by side with engineers and technicians for a very long time - I can deal with the crustiest example and laugh it off - just not months into an issue that has created a mountain of frustration.
The actual technical support is level 0 - asking me to do everything that I have already done 10 times over the past couple of months. I doubt it will be solved at that level. This is an issue for a higher level of technician IMHO. The tech threw out a suggestion to restore again from the cloud and send the logs. I told him it takes 60+ hours to do that. He said - 'Ok'. Not sure what support is available beyond that.
I tried once again to restore in the 32bit mode (previous crash was in 64bit) - crashed again after about 6 hours restoring to a dual HDD RAID mirror controlled by the the imbedded ICH10 on the motherboard. I am using the default Acronis recovery enviornment which appears to be Linux (don't know for sure). It has successfully restored twice to a single HDD, although the system will not boot. The last time I had a successful Acronis restore - I immeadiately saved an image with Paragon Hard Disk Manager to have that starting point backed up locally.
Do you suppose the WinPE version is more likely to stay alive for the duration of the restore?
The default Acronis recovery media is Linux and works just fine with single drives where the BIOS SATA mode is set to AHCI mode.
However, If you're using RAID (and the bios SATA mode is set to RAID), you almost certainly should be using WinPE. The default Linux recovery media doesn't have Intel Rapid Storage Technology IRST drivers and typically won't even detect a RAID 0/1/5 "hard drive" setup because storage controller drivers just aren't very good in the Acronis Linux media.
The default WinPE created by Acronis (which is based on the version of the Windows ADK you have installed) will have better "out of the box" driver support since it will include all of the Windows drivers that come with Windows ADK (bascially those that come with Windows during a fresh installation). But, even Windows ADK doesn't have 3rd party drivers like "Intel" baked in when it comes to storage controllers... those usually need to be added in seperately.
Not sure what version of the Windows ADK you have installed (if any at all). If running Windows 7 or higher, I would recommend removing any older versions of ADK and installing the Windows 10 ADK 1511 (link below). When you install it, select the first 3 items only (about 3.4Gb worth!). Then, use our MVP ATI WinPE builder (version 7.0 was released today - it is very nice and includes IRST Intel Raid controller drivers by default - the tool is also linked below.)
FYI, if you have a special RAID controller, which it sounds like you do not (LSI, rocket raid, or something unique to your motherboard), then grab those drivers to match your Win10 ADK and put them in the corresponding x86 or x64 folder in the MVP WinPE builder (depending upon if you need 64-bit or 32-bit WinPE - I'd guess 64-bit if you're using RAID). The tool will inject the drivers in those folders and wiill add in a file explorer, web browser and some other cool stuff to go with it and then Acronis will use that custom file to inject itself into when it launche the Acronis media builder (that's where you'd select WinPE and then have it create a bootable USB, .iso or disk - I'd go with the USB flash drive).
Once you have your bootable media, be sure to boot it to match the OS install. If your OS was legacy/MBR, be sure to boot the recovery media in legacy/MBR. If the OS was installed as GPT/UEFI, then be sure to boot the recovery media in UEFI mode. Using your one time boot menu or boot-override menu, will help you guarantee you're booting the recovery media correctly. Check out the screen shots in the link below th
Then try a cloud restore with it.
Curious, but what exactly is the error/failure you're seeing? Could it be an ISP issue there they're throttling your bandwidth because of the large download size during the restore? Does Acronis freeze up or throw a unique error or does it just stop? If you start it up again, it should pick up where it left off as it is supposed to detect what's currently on the desk and just restore the different blocks.
ADK WinPE10 (1511) MVP WinPE Builder (use this to build custom Acronis WinPE after you have Windows 10 1511 ADK installed) MBR vs UEFI (check out the screenshots to see what a one-time boot menu may look like and how to tell if you've booted Acronis media in UEFI or legacy mode).
Wonderful info! Thank you!
I have attached the error screen before it restarted. Hopefully it makes sense to anyone - I have not been able to gather any meaning yet.
EDIT: Working on getting a WinPE recovery USB built
Yup, that looks like a boot error in the Linux version. I think you'll do better with the WinPE version using the Mvp tool and the included irst drivers. Keep us posted after you have it made.
Carlos,
My apologies for not posting back, I have been without internet service since my first reply.
I am providing a link to Intel Communities and a discussion on breaking a RAID 1 array. Even though you began with a RAID 5 the basic principles are the same here. I take note of your posts above on one statement, that you have a recovered image on another drive. I believe that if you have now successfully changed your bios back to that of RAID mode you should be able to boot this single disk imaged drive. Why not attach it and give it a try, you got nothing to lose! It should also be possible to boot one or more of the disks in the original RAID set. I am hopeful that the information in the link below will be of help in resolving your issue.
The RAID5 had 2 failed drives - rendering it useless. One of the drives even has something lose rattling on the inside - a sure sign of an HDD problem. ;-) I don't think there is a recovery route for a 2 disk failure on a RAID5, right?
They did run for a very long time 24/7 without any issues.
Trying the WinPE option now, thank you all for the guidance and wisdom. When my frustration gets to a critical point, it makes troubleshooting even harder. This is helping my blood pressure get down to a managable level to continue inching forward. Much appreciated.
Correct, if 2 drives go out on a RAID 5 at the same time, it's done. However, if you have an Acronis backup of that RAID setup, you should still be able to recover to a new RAID configuration (although you'll probably need to set that up with new drives in the bios first), or even a single drive (still set in RAID mode though in the bios). With a full Acronis backup, you have some options to try to at least get the system back up and running with some disks.
I did try to restore to a single disk, but in AHCI mode. The BIOS automatically diables RAID if only one non-member disk is detected. That restore wsa built without any stated errors although could not boot.
When I tried to put 2 disks in the machine and BIOS config them as RAID - Acronis would crash on any restore attempt. Maybe the WinPE option would avoid that. So far, I have not had a chance to try WinPE
While I have looked high and low at MBR, diskerrors, RAM errors, etc - swapping the Windows generates Registry Backup allows the system to boot with errors. If there was a problem with MBR, it would never get that far.
What I would like to try is comparing the old backup registry and the registry that was active when the image was made. Not sure how to make a comparison on offline registry hives. It seems clear that there is an issue somewhere between the backup and active registries. Any ideas how to see the differences between the two? Offline regedit to undo/delete/adjust?
The bios switching automatically to AHCI is a problem. The OS was configured in RAID mode and has RAID drivers installed. If the bios is setting the SATA mode to AHCI automatically, but the OS is configured for RAID, it won't be bootable. I've not seen a bios behave this way, are you sure that's what it's doing? You should be able to leave the SATA mode as RAID, even if there is only 1 drive. You just won't have an actual RAID set.
If you can't control this behavior and have no choice but to restore your RAID image to a bios that is configued for AHCI SATA mode. You'll probably need to run universal restore against the single AHCI drive to generalize the drivers for the first "new" boot in AHCI mode. Also make sure that after you restore the image to the single drive that you go back into the bios and check the boot order - it's not uncommon for the bios to set a restored drive at a lower priority - which may mean it's trying to boot to something else instead.
I would not say with 100% certainty that is how it is behaving in regard to AHCI and RAID modes. After the Acronis restore to single AHCI drive - I cloned that to a RAID set. It behaves the same way - boot cycling with BSOD STOP code c000021a. Do you suppose if it was directly restored to the RAID it would make a difference?
Another update:
Through process of elimination, I found that restoring the backup registry hive SOFTWARE allows the system to boot. I wanted to find out which hive is the culprit so I swapped the hives one by one and attempted booting. If it did not work, I reverted back to the original hive. I had previously restored all of them all at once, which allowed the system to boot but with some of the software not working and unable to re-install.
Right now, it seems that the most critical software is working (fantastic news). There are still some odd problems, like renaming a folder brings up an error "Could Not Find This Item" when I click Try Again - it renames the folder. Not a critical problem, just an odd one.
A more critical concern remains - it will not do any backup and restore actions. 'Find and Fix Problems' does nothing. If it cannot create a restore point, it will not be able to update. Maybe now I can use some Wondows tools to compare the original and backup SOFTWARE registry hives to find something that is out of place. Huge step forward overall! It feels like I have found the smoking gun and just need to figure out why it is smoking now.
I would not say with 100% certainty that is how it is behaving in regard to AHCI and RAID modes. After the Acronis restore to single AHCI drive - I cloned that to a RAID set. It behaves the same way - boot cycling with BSOD STOP code c000021a. Do you suppose if it was directly restored to the RAID it would make a difference?
I think it would. Keep in mind, you don't have to have a RAID configuration set, only the SATA mode in the bios to be set as RAID instead of AHCI. As an example, I have a single PCIE NVME hard drive (Samsung 950 Pro). However, I have the SATA mode as RAID in the bios as NVME drives are limited by AHCI que depths so setting them in RAID (which is what OEM's are doing for laptops coming with single NVME PCIE hard drives now are also doing), allows them to take advantage of deeper queue depths and better performance.
That stop code is not one I was expecting though - that does appear to be a system OS error - possibly corruption from the failing RAID. You could try booting to a Windows installer disc and trying system startup repair and if that doesn't fix it on it's own, go back into the repair option, advanced command prompt and run chkdsk /f /r on the main drive:
https://neosmart.net/wiki/chkdsk/
- Insert the original Windows disc
- Restart your PC and boot from the disc
- Click Repair your computer
- Choose the operating system from the list
- Click Next
- Choose Command Prompt
- When it opens, type the command:
chkdsk /f /r
- Press Enter
I did the chkdsk early on - it found a number of fragments that seem to be user data (unrelated to any system data) and no physical disk issues. This was true with the single HDD, SSD, and RAID attempts I have made so far. Lots of chkdsk'ing over the past couple months.
So, it appears the registgry hive SOFTWARE is corrupt to the point where it cannot be read by regedit. I tried to load the hive into regedit - nothing! That would explain things a little. Next I tried to download the hive file from the days leading up to the crash - no difference. All the otgher hives load fine and I can read them without a problem.
Now, a critical piece of info is that the system was totally bootable while the RAID was failing. I had to re-boot to add the new drives - meaning the SOFTWARE hive was just fine at that time. The Acronis file restore I am doing is from 2 weeks earlier and it is not readable. Looking for any MS utilities to recover a damaged hive file. I feel like some of the other hives may be damaged as well, just not quite enough to prevent booting up. The reason I think that is because of all the strange behavior I see. Maybe it's all related to the SOFTWARE hive - not sure.
The RAID failed about 8/22/16
The last backup was 8/10/16 (Acroinis had stopped backing up at that point reporting some internal error)
The backup registry files are from 8/5/16 (I copied the SOFTWARE hive from here to get the system to boot). Not sure how these backup hives came to be and what may be wrong with them.
Everything seems to point to registry corruption. Reason for corruption unknown, but Acronis seems to be first in line to be blamed since I know it was all working 12 days after the last backup.
Restoring individual files from Acronis is pure pain! So remarkably slow and painful along with soul crushing failures.
The system corrupted my backup, provides no valuable support, relies on the goodwill of users for actual support, then makes an all day journey to pick a few individual files from the cloud. Wow! I have spent 6+ hours trying to get various versions of the registry files. So far, I have managed to download 3 files.
How are they still in business?
EDIT: I just loaded the backup SOFTWARE hive from %system%\windows\system32\config\regback and it loads without issue. The online registry hive SOFTWARE is completely trashed. I rolled back and downloaded many versions for the months leading up to the crash - they are all trash as well.
This is a fundemental failure of the core promise that Acronis makes. It failed to backup system files. There were no error messages or warnings. It has nothing to do with the restore hardware configuration or methods that I have been falsly chasing. It has nothing to do with partitions, BCD, or any other low level boot mechanism. If the SOFTWARE registry hive is unreadable - nothing had a chance. This has cost me dearly in both time (measured in weeks of research, hacking, waiting, trying, etc) and frustration.
The system is limping along which is better than totally dead, but it nearly killed me. Just for kicks - I updated TrueImage and set it up to do a local backup. It failed! It did nothing for 2 hours although it said "backing up". When I finally pressed the STOP button, it says 'processing' for over an hour before I forced it to bail out. Yep, 3 hours with nothing to show for it.
The exact same thing with Paragon Hard Disk Manager on the same machine immeadiately started backing up to my NAS and was done in a hour. It has also successfully restored numerous other PC's without a single hitch.
Carlos,
Wow, your experience here is very sad! I understand your displeasure with all you've gone through. I would encourage you however to do one more thing and that is to provide Feedback to Acronis on your experience using the Feedback link at the top right hand side of this page. Reference or link to this thread in that Feedback is also advised here. This is the only way that the support engineers will know of your plight!
In looking at your last post here and take note that your screenshot indicates that the Cloud backup page failed and the connection was closed which of course makes the backup fail indeed. You also compare Paragon backing up to your NAS being done in an hour to this Cloud backup failure. In all fairness that is an apples to oranges comparison. How does True Image stackup to Paragon if used to run a backup to your NAS?
How does True Image stackup to Paragon if used to run a backup to your NAS?
True image was in fact setup to save an image to the NAS (which only works if I map it as a drive since it does not want to connect direct). So it was an apples to apples compare - the two pieces of software were both set to backup to the same NAS from the same machine (at different times of course). One worked and one did not.
The frustration with downloading specific files is a separate issue, did not mean to co-mingle the rant, lol. When trying to restore individual files from the Acronis website, it is so clunky and each folder level requires a long wait. I kept getting errors like the one I posted the pic of. When that happened, it would revert back to the root directory and I had to very slowly navigate back to the folder where I needed to be. In the end, it works but at a pace that is too slow to be practical.
On the current restore, I have patched/repaired as much as I can to get as much of the software working as possible (many hours of work to make that happen). Now, I am taking a break to setup Paragon to do an image of it's current state and I may attempt a repair install in hopes the broken system functions will be repaired. I anticipate another long challenge.
I responded to a followup from Acronis on my service ticket in hopes that they may have some secret way to repair the registry hives without a repair install (which is liekly to mess up a lot of the software licesnses and preferences). My hopes are rather low, but I thought I would ask. I would be happy to convey the experience to Acronis, but after the way the support chat went - I would expect it to fall on deaf ears.
Carlos, for the mapping issue, have you tried the hotfix - https://kb.acronis.com/content/59051. It's a known bug in the current release. Without the patched files, you can connect to an SMB share by stopping and starting the workstation service first. Once connected, backups and restores will work, but if you try to setup a new connection or edit the existing one, you'll get an error unless you have the patched files in place (or unless you stop/start the worskstation service if you've logged off the Windows session since doing so).
I don't have much experience with Paragon, I tested it and bought it as a backup, backup solution at one point in time, but returned it after all of my restores that were located on my NAS would fail at 99%. It also didn't support EMMC flash hard drives (which I didn't know when I bought it) and I have an ASUS T200 with a 64GB emmc drive that I intended to use it with for a secondary backup. Ultimately, I don't think there is a single 100% full proof backup tool out there - I've tried a lot and Acronis has been the best for me (especially the offline full disk backups that I try to take regularly). I also found that backups with Acronis, Macrium and Paragon were roughly the same in backup and restore time. In some cases, one product would win out over the other, but Acronis was usually the fastest (by a small margin) in my tests. It really wasnt' much of a difference that the majority of users would care if it took 30 seconds longer for one product or the other though. The Cloud is a different beast...
My only other thought to leave you with is... if your drives were failing and system files were corrupted who knows what corruption may have existed and where it started from. Acronis back up blocks of data - whatever lives on them. If the RAID died and one of the disks is physically damaged as well, there could be some long standing corruption to system files that were in place from who knows when. I get that the system was booting at the time of these backups, but bad data is bad data - if you backup bad data, you restore bad data. It is odd that all of your backups of the system hive are bad, which makes me think there was a problem with it, but there's really no way to tell. Can you restore some some older Windows system logs to see if there are disk errors showing up before the backups were taken? That might point to the culprit, but it might also be a wild goose chase.
Regardless of your path forward, whatever backup product you use (hopeuflly a mix of a couple for redundany and increased chance of recovery), consider taking some offline backups as well. This will help alleviate other issues like 3rd party applications, OS issues, malware, antivirus, and/or VSS coming into play. An offline backup while the OS is idle, can be your best frield when it comes time to recover. Despite all of my backups, redundancy to different locations and redundancy with different products, my most reliable backups have always been those taken with the Acronis offline recovery media.
Not sure I will ever know exactly what happened since the majority of the process is either concealed or I don't understand it. If the SOFTWARE hive was bad months before the RAID failure - the system would not have booted up then. It had no errors or quirks at all. Even when the RAID was failing, it still had no trouble with booting or anything else. I restored a SOFTWARE hive from 2 months earlier and it is unreadable - about 10 versions that I downloaded coiuld be read. The same hive found in the offline backup folder is readable with no issues.
I would guess that there was an issue with access to a protected system resource that was not resolved. It could be that the file is broken in a variety of possible ways. There is no way the SOFTWARE hive was totally unreadable for months leading up to the RAID fail - the PC would have crashed a long time before the disks went south.
I do agree that a more robust approach is needed to prevent this in the future. Acronis has demonstrated that it will fail without any errors or warnings followed by lack of support. While I don't think Paragon is the solution to the worlds problems, I have yet to have an issue with online and offline backups and restores with XP, 7, 8, and 10 to/from NAS and USB disks. Once I get past this debacle, I will look for another option and do full restore tests with it. I should have done the same restore test with Acronis before the RAID failed - at least then I would have know it was not going to work while I still had options.
Just to be clear, I have no expectation that any software should be perfect, but it should at least offer reasonable error reporting when it's core functionality is not longer working. I was running on false hope the whole time.
I see, well, the cloud service is not as robust as is needed in all cases. The reason could be the result of a number of things but the most common is that of a users ISP connection limitations. Many have slow download/upload internet service packages which are simply not up to task for the transfer of large amounts of data. For myself I have great download speeds, but my upload speeds top out at 12Mbps. Because of this I do not use the cloud that much. I practice other redundant storage techniques instead. I have seen other users post with issues on restore attempts failing when attempted from the cloud. That fact steers me clear of having a full disk image stored there with any hopes of recovery. So until connection limits change and the common user such as myself can actually use the cloud reliably for data storage and recovery I will just grin and be on my way.
In the local storage area, I run backups to an NAS using True Image. Unlike you I have no problem with connection. I am in the minority with that however I believe because I see many whom cannot connect reliably or at all. A good number of those use Synology devices by the way.
I will point out to you that there is a higher level of focus on feedback it seems when done through the Forum link or the in app link found in the Help section of the application. So again I encourage you to use that feature to again report your issue. Recovery of a backup has always been at the top of the priority list for Acronis.