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Can't do PC Recovery to same disk... Target greyed out

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OK, I've backed up my complete system and when I try to do a full PC Recovery, I select the "disk 1" (which selects all partitions on the disk) but when I go to the "target disk" the disk (that I just backed up) is greyed out and I can't restore to it.

It's Windows 10.  I booted UEFI to a flash drive with Acronis Recovery Media and the disk was originally formatted GPT (from the factory).

At this point I am at a loss.  Any suggestions as to why my target disk is greyed out?

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Don't know it if it helps but the target disk shows an interface of "Serial ATA" -- do I need to load Serial ATA drivers when I create the boot media?  I can't imagine that it wouldn't be able to access a Serial ATA drive natively.

And I did change the boot order so the UEFI Flash drive booted before the "Windows Boot Manager"

Steve, welcome to these User Forums.

There should be no need to load any SATA drivers in the Acronis Rescue Media, especially if your target drive is being shown in the list within the application panels.

If your drive is GPT then your Windows OS must be using a BIOS Boot Mode of UEFI to support this and therefore your Acronis Rescue Media needs to be booted using the same boot mode - this is normally shown by an entry having the letters UEFI against the device selection, where any device without these letters would be a Legacy boot device.

It is possible that the reason your target drive is not able to be selected would be because Windows was not shut down fully before booting from the rescue media - this will happen if Windows Fast Start is enabled where Windows goes into a Hybrid Sleep state which locks the OS drive to prevent changes.

I would recommend either forcing a full shutdown by pressing the Shift key when clicking on Shutdown, or else doing a Restart then selecting to boot from the USB Rescue Media.

In reply to by truwrikodrorow…

I will try that... I will say that I press <ESC> to get to the boot menu and it is a legacy looking BIOS menu but the boot device I select is UEFI Flash Drive which DOES boot so I am "ASSUMING" I'm booting it UEFI.

Is it possible I booted UEFI but the disk is now legacy bios for some reason and the flash boot can't access it?  Or is that only a one way street?  (Legacy BIOS can't access UEFI but UEFI can access both)

Steve, your BIOS will be UEFI and providing you select the UEFI option for your USB media then you are in that mode.  UEFI BIOS can / does support Legacy devices.

One of the key considerations with regards to UEFI versus Legacy is that only UEFI support GPT partitioned drives, Legacy does not as it only supports MBR drives with a max size of 2TB.

I tried rebooting as you suggested and the destination disk is still grayed out. Any other ideas?

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Sometimes corruption on a disk can cause the application to grey out a disk as none usable.  This may be the case for you.

You should try running chkdsk /r on all partition on the greyed disk prior to attempting the recovery to it.  Partitions that do not have drive letters can be scanned by chkdsk by using Windows Disk Management to temporarily assign drive letters to them.