My head is spinning ... Simple - Backed up disk with TI, Restore with defauits - MBR Error 1
I have looked at countless "here's how to fix" posts, tried 6 or 7 possibilities with TI Recovery. I have a perfectly good TI backup of my disk. 1 full and 3 incrementals. I do "add new disk" (it is a new disk) then restore (a) the 37Mb FAT16 unlabeled (pri), (b) NTFS 225.17 MB RECOVERY (Pri,act), NTFS OS 465Gb (pri) (this is a bigger disk so it has a larger size), and the MBR and Track 0. The recovery goes perfectly. Then ... MBR Error 1.
Trust me, I have tried so many things, and read some truly outrageous and obscure s**t on the net. This should be sooooooo simple. I have a backup from a few days ago. I installed a new and larger disk.
Acronis had no problem with the restore. It went perfect; I tried to Add New Disk, set the partitions exactly the same, then with and without the recovery partition, no luck. Then I tried to go basic and just recover the 40 MB FAT16 and the main C drive (Pri, Act) and keep the MBR that "add new disk" leaves, not restoring the MBR from the original backup. Bzzzt. Same problem. I have no idea if the Acronis Recovery was set or not. I don't even know what it is. Maybe 5 years ago I did something with it ?!?!?
I read about the magic incantation >bootrec /fixmbr. Yeah, I put the W7 DVD in, no OS detected. I then spent nearly a day trying all of the drivers that might maybe work. No luck. Never detected the OS (again this is after a 100% perfect restore) And YES THE BOOT ORDER IS RIGHT! This iso a plain vanilla dual SATA Dell.
Is there a way to just get a C drive partition to restore from a TrueImage backup??? I don't want any fancy stuff. And man the TrueImage booting off a USB key is slow.
-- Bob (two days later and frustrated)


- Log in to post comments

Thanks you SO MUCH for trying to help I really appreciate it!
Is it to the same original computer or to a new one?
Same exact computer, new disks.
1) Do you know if you booted the rescue media in Legacy/MBR mode or UEFI mode?
What is "rescue media"? Do you mean the Acronis Bootable Rescue that I have on a USB Stick? I don't know what UEFI is. I see it in the BIOS when I stop it to boot from the Acronis rescue stick There is only one choice in the F12 boot list that will boot the USB stick "usb device" and it boots into Acronis True Image.
2) Make sure to just do a default disk restore (don't do individual partitions).
I'm not sure what you mean. When I open the backup for restore, it presents me with 4 partitions. How can I back up without individual partitions when there are clearly 4 there to restore. See below for the last test. I just let it default everything. Is that what you meant? I apologize if I am being dense.
3) Have you changed the hard drive you're restoring too? Just making sure because legacy Windows 7 can't boot on anything bigger than 2TB.
Yes new drive but 2TB, as I know that limitation.
It also does not have native support for a PCIeNVME hard drive.
What is that? I put in a vanilla Seagate Barracuda 2TB SATA drive. Keep in mind this is a years old Dell that has been running peachy with 500 MB vanilla SATA drives.
If all else fails, you might find that you can just do a NEW Windows 7 installation on the disk... this should fix any boot partition issues. ...etc.
Wow. I am so surprised that I can't just restore this thing. I have used TrueImage many times before without problems. I wonder if this is related to the Intel Rapid Storage RAID controller. I wanted to try to somehow make up a new RAID volume with these disks but no luck. Hitting ^I won't stop in the Rapid Storage Manager during bootup (any more !?!?!?!?). I may put the old disks in and try to re-form the RAID 1 then restore. Now that I now that last incremental is what was corrupted I might be able to do that. I'm damn desperate and will try anything, including your idea of installing a fresh Win7 and getting that to boot. How can I tell UEFI from "vanilla"? NOTE I have not changed anything in the BIOS for boot order or mode.
Review
The backup was done with the Intel Rapid Storage RAID-1 enabled and running with two drives in RAID-1. I removed both old drives from the RAID and now on boot it shows normal separate drives, no RAID membership etc. It took me a day to realize the importance of the "Allocation table corrupted, you cannot change the size of this partition, check with your tools after recovery" error when specifying the C partition. So I dropped back to the previous day's (#4 of 5) and that error went away. Now I can restore with zero errors. I have tried to manually allocate the partitions within Add New Disk, and also just wipe the disk with "Add New DIsk" and taking all of the defaults for the three partitions from the backup and the MBR from the backup. I also tried to allocate just the 40MB FAT16 and the main partitions in the Add New Disk, letting it take all of the rest of the new disk, and and it said *IT* would write the MBR. OK then I restored without the MBR from the backup. Lose. MBR Error 1.....
My last test for tonight was
- Add new disk -> all unallocated
- Select the backup and see the 4 pieces (FAT16, RECOVERY, OS (big) and MBR) then stepping through and letting it default everything. It restored with no errors.
- MBR Error 1 press any key to boot from floppy (which does nothing)
I'm out of ideas. I know damn well that the OS image is sitting there in the main (big) partition. Grrrrr...... I know I am missing something. But what?
- Log in to post comments

To clarify, the recovery media is the USB stick from which you boot Acronis.
The additional information about the creation of RAID array. Please say if the system had the OS on a raid partition before you did the recovery.
I am also a little confused by your mention of the "add disk" - I get the impression you are doing this after doing the recovery in which case it apparently will wipe the disk.
Depending on the BIOS of the PC, it can support legacy boot, UEFI boot or both. When used on a PC that supports both legacy and UEFI there will be two boot options for the recovery media, on for Legacy Mode (however described) and the other for UEFI. If you accidentally used UEFI it would probably mangle the installation.
Ian
- Log in to post comments

Thank you so much for trying to help.
To clarify, the recovery media is the USB stick from which you boot Acronis.
OK, I get it, thanks.
The additional information about the creation of RAID array. Please say if the system had the OS on a raid partition before you did the recovery.
Yes, it was on a RAID-1 "partition" which was actually the 4 partitions (or are these sub-partitions within the RAID-1 partition?).
I am also a little confused by your mention of the "add disk" - I get the impression you are doing this after doing the recovery in which case it apparently will wipe the disk.
Sorry for the confusion. I first used Add New DIsk to create the partitions to prove to myself that I had total control of the disk and that these ops would succeed. My last (and first) try was to use Add New Disk (it is indeed a new disk, never having had anything, fresh out of the box) leaving just unallocated space and using MBR as the mode. Afterward I did the Restore Disk, by sectors not file-by-file, and taking the defaults fr the pieces (FAT16, RECOVERY, main OS and MBR) all the way both the first time and again last night as my last failed act.
Depending on the BIOS of the PC, it can support legacy boot, UEFI boot or both. When used on a PC that supports both legacy and UEFI there will be two boot options for the recovery media, on for Legacy Mode (however described) and the other for UEFI. If you accidentally used UEFI it would probably mangle the installation.
I boot the USB stick with legacy boot.
Question from me? GIven that the backup was done from a 2-disk RAID-1 set, is it even possible to get a working restore in any way on a single plain vanilla disk? I still see the Intel RAID controller appear when I boot the system. I have two other systems with that same controller but non-RAID so I know it is possible to run disks simply non-RAID like that.
One last thing, and this may be a clue, I did get this backup set to boot while the old disks were in and RAIDed, but I had Allocation Table Errors (from TrueImage). Sure enough, though I got past the MBR error, the system booted into disk repair and spewed out loads of allocation table errors, I incorrectly concluded that this was due to one of the disks being damaged, so I un-RAIDED them., removed them, installed new disks. But the Allocation Table errors persisted, and I eventually found that the last (5th) incremental was the one with the errors. By running the backup with only the full + first 5 incrementals, the Allocation Table errors from TrueImage disappeared.
So to summarize, I have two brand new 2TB disks installed, on a system that has a RAID controller but which shows them as healthy single disks when booted, no changes to the boot sequence on the BIOS, It has booted the restored but corrupted incremental on the old disks with RAID, but now when restored I get MBR error 1.
I should note that one glib "oh this is easy to fix" post said boot your WIndows 7 repair disk, open the repair console and type bootrec /fixmbr. No go on this because the OS doesn't show, etc. which I described above in more detail. Of course Googling for how to load the drivers and get bootrec to see the restored system resulted in limitless complex and unrelated threads from "helpful" people.
####
- Log in to post comments

OK, I was able to get into the Intel Rapid Storage "bios" UI and create a nedw RAID-1 set from the two disks. I am not running the restore on that RAID, which should exactly duplicate the conditions of the backup (except for the larger disk size available.
I'll report back.
- Log in to post comments

Robert, sorry to come back to you with more questions than answers here but it is best that we have a full understanding of exactly what you are trying to do.
Have you made any changes to the BIOS settings at any time during this saga?
If not (hopefully), please check what you have as the main boot device (or priority)?
From your updates, it does sound as if you have a UEFI capable system given you wrote:
I don't know what UEFI is. I see it in the BIOS when I stop it to boot from the Acronis rescue stick There is only one choice in the F12 boot list that will boot the USB stick "usb device" and it boots into Acronis True Image.
if your BIOS boot settings show "Windows Boot Manager" for how your original Windows 7 OS used to boot from the RAID 1 drive array, then that is also how you much boot from the Acronis Rescue Media to perform a successful restore of your backup image files.
Note: "Windows Boot Manager" shows this is a UEFI boot system, otherwise the disk drive itself will be shown for a Legacy boot system.
All Acronis Rescue Media is capable of booting in both Legacy and UEFI modes but not all BIOS will offer both options. If you restore a backup of a UEFI system when booting in Legacy mode it will never work. If you restore a backup of a Legacy system in UEFI mode then Acronis will convert the restored system to use UEFI with GPT partitioning.
With regards to the RAID controller in your computer - if you attempt to restore to a RAID array using the Acronis Rescue Media, the array has to present to ATI as if it is a single drive, or else you will need to use the Windows PE version of the Rescue Media with the Intel RST drivers for RAID support injected.
For the rescue media, there are 3 different versions available:
Simple: created based on your Windows Recovery Environment for WinPE media.
Advanced: created based on Windows ADK (or AIK for earlier OS versions) - WinPE media.
Advanced: created based on a small Linux distro OS (BusyBox).
See the following reference documents.
KB 61632: Acronis True Image 2019: how to create bootable media
- Log in to post comments

To all who helped.. thanks very much!!! I know it took considerable time and your efforts (and knowledge) are appreciated! No Windows Boot Manager or UEFI involved...
Update: With a fresh outlook on life today, I decided to re-form the two 2TB disks into a RAID-1 (mirror) array and then restore. It worked! So... the take-aways from this are:
- If TrueImage Restore reports disk errors like Allocation Table corruption or anything, and you are restoring from a full+incremental backup set, try skipping the most recent incremental and start with the one before than. Keep going back in the incrementals until you find one that doesn't produce errors during the selection a nd setup process.
- If you back up a RAID-1 (mirror) array, which presents as a single disk drive, then you cannot restore later to a single disk and expect it to be bootable. You must restore back to a RAID-1 as it was backed up. So on replacing disks you must form a new RAID array just like the one for the disks you are replacing. If you want to un-RAID it, you need to do this at a time when the system is running and (1) back up, (2) do the un-Raid in the Intel Rapid Storage Manager, (3) check to see that it runs fine with non-raid disk, (4) back up again and expect to use that one if you need to restore. The one from step (1) is useless for non-RAID.
This is a really valuable lesson for me, as I have several other systems on which the hardware is getting old, and will be looking to do an Acronis TrueImage Universal type restore to new hardware. It is not practical to wipe and restart the OS from scratch on these.
I am now going back to restore with an expanded C partition to take advantage of the additional space, and restoring a formerly external disk to a second partition on the RAIDed disk so I can get rid of the external disk on which that data has been living. I'll report back on the final outcome. At least I know I can always get back to a running system now.
- Log in to post comments

Robert, great that you have got a successful recovery and an action plan for going forward - thanks for sharing your feedback.
- Log in to post comments

I'm also glad all is well! The easiest method to recover is always with the most common factors being similar in the restore process. Acronis can and will (usually) be able to restore to a bootable working state, especially in the same system, but things like RAID, the OS type (Windows 7 is not as forgiving with drivers as Windows 10) and bios settings across different hardware can trip people up.
- If you back up a RAID-1 (mirror) array, which presents as a single disk drive, then you cannot restore later to a single disk and expect it to be bootable. You must restore back to a RAID-1 as it was backed up. So on replacing disks you must form a new RAID array just like the one for the disks you are replacing. If you want to un-RAID it, you need to do this at a time when the system is running and (1) back up, (2) do the un-Raid in the Intel Rapid Storage Manager, (3) check to see that it runs fine with non-raid disk, (4) back up again and expect to use that one if you need to restore. The one from step (1) is useless for non-RAID.
I don't think I'd agree with this, generally speaking. We've seen others move from a physical RAID to a single disk setup and vice-versa with success, without the additional step(s).
Windows 7 just is not as friendly with these changes as Windows 10, but it should be possible. However, if the bios switched from RAID to AHCI, Windows 7 won't be able to boot up. Not sure if this happened in your original attempts, but did you change the bios mode to AHCI, or did it default to it when the bios RAID was not enabled at the time? As long as the bios mode was the same and the backup was good, even with Windows 7, the restore and bootability should be possible, even if the original backup was taken from a 2-disk mirror RAID (0 or 1) and restored to a single disk setup on the same system.
I know there are a lot of Windows 7 systems still out there, but personally, I'll be glad when Microsoft drops support for it next year. In terms of general driver supportability and compatibility, as well as ability to handle changes from Legacy/MBR to UEFI/GPT and other things like changing from RAID to AHCI (or vice-versa), Windows 7 can be a real headache. It is possible to get around most of these in Windows 7, but not for your general home user. You have to run specific Microsoft Hotfixes or make registry changes just before doing a backup (and before booting into the OS again) or Windows 7 just can't handle them. Windows 10, although not perfect, sure handles these types of changes MUCH, MUCH better.
- Log in to post comments

As a followup, I was not able to restore a logical partition on the new RAID from a backup of a separate external USB HDD. The drive and its data are fine, so I just copied to a new USB drive and we'll go on like this. Anyway, I apologize for making a categorical statement based on a sample of one. You're right.
- Log in to post comments

Robert no worries! And we all appreciate the feedback and information for what worked in your situation! I'm sure others could benefit from it too.
- Log in to post comments