Acronis Survival Kit
I think the Acronis Survival Kit is definitely a step in the right direction. I don't like workarounds and having to load my own drivers. I think this should be included in the core product.
I installed Survival Kit on my external USB drive and the first time I tried to do a restore I got an error during the last step of recovery. I gave Acronis a second try and it worked flawlessly. I have a very complex system with a lot of hard drives connected via SATA and USB 3.0 including external enclosures. I have a total of 15 drives.
I used Rescue Media Builder to create a USB bootable thumb drive but my system failed to boot. Now you see why I like Survival Kit.
I have a question. Why does bare metal recovery always put the MSR partition first? This has always been one of my pet peaves. If Acronis could put it before the GPT partition where it belongs I would be so happy.
The order only matters with respect to the EFI or System partition. The next version upgrade of windows from that restored will reorder the partitions to:
- Recovery
- System
- MSR
- Primary
:)
It causes problems with recovery partition when MSR is placed first. Windows doesn't know the correct partition number for the recovery partition. I've made this suggestion multiple times. Maybe one day Acronis will get it right.
What Microsoft Recommends
- System (EFI)
- MSR
- Primary
- Recovery
What Acronis changes it to
- MSR
- System (EFI)
- Primary
- Recovery
Well funny thing. I just did a bare metal recovery a few days ago and True Image recovered the disk partitions in the following order:
- MSR
- Recovery
- System
- Primary
How do you mean "Windows doesn't know the correct partition number for the recovery partition." I do not understand this.
I think I get what you are saying here. You use BIOS/MBR format system disks and MS recommends that the Recovery partition be placed after the Primary partition. MS also recommends that this same Recovery Partition for disks formatted UEFI/GPT be placed before the Primary partition.
BIOS/MBR disk formats do not contain an MSR partition. They do contain hidden sectors however which are not allowed for GPT format disks hence the use of MSR.
I think the issue you speak of is that of the Recovery partition being placed ahead of the Primary partition on an MBR disk when Windows expects it to be behind the Primary partition. Is this correct?
Correct, Acronis restored the partitions in the wrong order. I'm referring to UEFI/GPT based hard drive partitions. When you locate the MSR partition in the wrong place it causes Windows RE configuration to try and boot the incorrect partition because the partition number has now changed.
Technogod,
I agree with you. This has also been a pet peeve of mine for years. That's what prompted me to post this thread:
It's not as bad now with TI 2019 as it was with earlier versions of TI. When you do a restore of a UEFI/GPT system to a new disk you will see mixed results. Restoring to an empty disk that is exactly the same size as the original disk will result in the partition order and size being exactly the same as it was on the original disk. When you restore to a new disk that is a different size than the original disk, you will see the problem. The MSR partition will be moved to the first partition on the disk. Acronis will always make it 128 MB even if the original MSR partition was only 16 MB.
This may or may not cause problems with the status of WinRE on the system. I think Acronis is trying to deal with this issue at the end of the restore when you see the message synchronizing with the operating system. If you do end up with WinRE not working properly, you can fix the problem. Here's how:
1. Open a command prompt as administrator. Enter:
reagentc /info
You will see the status of WinRE. It will either show as Enabled or Disabled.
2. If it shows as Disabled, enter:
reagentc /setreimage /?
This will give you help in setting the WinRE path properly. You need to assign a drive letter to the Recovery partition to use the setreimage option. Example:
reagentc /setreimage /path R:\Recovery\WindowsRE
Where R: is the letter assigned to the Recovery partition.
3. Enter:
reagentc /info
You should now see that WinRE in Enabled.
4. Remove the drive letter from the Recovery partition.
The next time I have to perform an actual bare metal recovery I'll give it a try. This was a test restore on a 931GB SSD. The original drive is 446GB. I use VEEAM for bare metal restores because they can restore the partitions in the correct order no matter what size the destination drive.
Acronis did restore partitions to their original sizes and left the rest of the disk unallocated.
Yes, True Image does work that way. I agree this should be fixed!