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About 3-5 minutes in while doing a drive image Acronis crashes to black screen and the system reboots

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Which Acronis Product is causing trouble?

Acronis True Image 2019 build 17750 running from bootable media.

 

What operation was it busy doing when the problem occurred?

During a backup image creation.

 

What's wrong?

About 3-5 minutes in Acronis crashes to black screen and the system reboots.

 

What error does it show?

No error because it crashes straight to a black screen before reboot.

 

Were changes (like new hardware or software installation) made before the problem occurred?

No changes were made. This was just a run of the mill backup but it’s worth noting that I’ve never in the last four years been able to make a drive image from this machine directly. This is a persistent issue that’s persisted through several versions of Acronis. I’ve always had to pull the drive and image it using another machine.

 

Here’s the machine where the problem occurred:

Dell XPS 8900

Bios 2.0.1

Intel Core I7-6700 running at 3.40ghz

8192mg of ram

DirectX 12

Running Windows 10 Home 64 bit build 10586

Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500gb

 

Things I’ve done so far:

I’ve had to do some extraordinary things over the years to make Acronis do a backup. Usually the problems were related to getting Acronis to boot. Sometimes from a cd, sometimes from flash, even from another computer across the network pretending to be a local cdrom… I just can’t recall a time when Acronis crashed in the middle of a backup.

 

It’s also worthy of note that this is the only machine that this version of Acronis does this on. It’s worked fine on all the other machines I’ve tried it on. This particular machine is a problem. I’ve tried an Acronis boot cd, A standard true image bootable flash, and bootable PE. The same issue happens with all of them.

 

You would think the machine is faulty. It is not. It’s worked flawlessly for the last 4 years. What I’ve resorted to doing was pulling the SSD from the pc and installing it in another pc to make a drive image. I’d like to not have to do this anymore. If anyone has any ideas I’d welcome them. I’ve always had a suspicion it’s just a simple setting somewhere buried in the bios that I need to check or uncheck but nothing jumps out at me.

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David, welcome to these public User Forums.

You have certainly brought a puzzling scenario to the forums and one that on the face of things, looks to be very specific to this one Dell XPS 8900 computer.

Some further questions:

Do you have ATI 2019 #17750 installed within Windows 10 on this system?

Have you tried making a backup from within Windows using ATI 2019?
If yes, do you see the same issue / crash / reboot?

Which type of Acronis Rescue Media are you using for your bootable media?
What type of boot media are you using, is this a USB stick, CD or DVD media?

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 KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media - please ensure you are using the correct boot mode to match how Windows 10 boots on this system.

Finally, when you have removed the SSD and made a backup on a different computer, have you checked the log for the backup action to ensure that there were no messages present to suggest any warnings etc?

My initial thoughts are tending to believe that the SSD itself is working fine given the backup succeeds when performed on a different system, but that perhaps there is some other hardware issue on the XPS that only shows under specific circumstances and under stress.

It looks like there is an urgent bios update, dated 20Jun2019 - version 2.6.1. I would start with that.

I've Googled forums on the XPS forums and lots of complaints about random and repeating reboots. Only one showed it fixed after updating the network drivers. Others complaining that Dell says it's the Nvidia graphics card and/or drivers, but still rebooting, especially when an external monitor is attached.

I would suggest updating all the drivers you can and reboot. Then rebuild the rescue media with the WinRE option.this should use the latest drivers in the build.

I don't know why, but I can't find any command and deploy driver packs from Dell for the XPS 8900! You can get them individually, but that is strange. Update the bios first. Then update the network NIC and wireless drivers and then the graphics drivers for the dedicated card and the Intel Cpu graphics. Reboot, then build new rescue media with the WinRE option.

Hopefully that does the trick. If not, I'd try disabling the graphics card in the bios and only using the Intel embedded graphics and see if the reboot still happens or not.