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Booting From Acronis CD into Windows 10 with UEFI

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I need help configuring the UEFI settings to permit me to boot from my Acronis 2019 TI boot CD to restore the image of my hard drive to my Dell Precision 7750 laptop running 64 bit Windows 10 Professional.  

Windows crashed when I tried to do a system restore. I cannot boot into windows or safe mode. Whenever I boot I get a BSOD. I have my hard drive  backed to a tib file on an external USB drive. But I cannot boot from my Acronis 2019 TI boot CD.  I never had this problem with Windows 7 or XP. And I never knew anything about UEFI until now. It seems that UEFI only allows booting from an internal drive or from a Dell Recovery CD.  

I don't want to wipe out my hard drive and go back to a factory restore. But I don't know how to boot into Windows 10 from a CD on an external drive when the OS is using UEFI. Can I safely disable UEFI, then boot from the CD and if TI restores the image, would the restored HD have UEFI automatically enabled? 

   

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Ronald, please do not attempt to restore your backup image by booting in Legacy mode on your UEFI boot system!  Doing so will produce a non-booting Windows OS regardless of any messages saying the restore was successful!  This is because you will have migrated the OS from UEFI to Legacy which put simply, doesn't work!  Doing the opposite is fine providing the BIOS supports both Legacy and UEFI.

Next, what type of Acronis bootable CD do you have?  If this is one that was created from the .ISO CD image downloaded from your Acronis account, then it is Linux based, as such you may need to turn off UEFI Secure Boot in order to be able to boot from it.

All Acronis Rescue Media is capable of booting in both Legacy & UEFI BIOS boot modes, so it is normally just a case of picking the correct boot menu entry for the device being used, i.e. in your Dell Boot Menu (normally by pressing the F12 key on startup), it should show an entry with the text 'UEFI' along with the CD drive make etc.  You may have two entries for the CD drive, one without UEFI mentioned, and one with it.  It is the latter you need to choose to boot from.

If you have another PC with ATI 2019 installed, then I would recommend creating the 'Simple' Windows PE version of the Rescue Media which is fully compatible with UEFI Secure Boot.  I would recommend creating the media on a small USB memory stick (min size 2GB, max size 32GB).

KB 59877: Acronis True Image: how to distinguish between UEFI and Legacy BIOS boot modes of Acronis Bootable Media

KB 61632: Acronis True Image 2019: how to create bootable media

KB 61621: Acronis True Image 2019: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

Thanks, Steve,

I sent a response to you a few hours ago but it has not yest shown up on the forum.  If this post gets posted I will recreate my earlier post.

The F12 boot options do not include a cd/dvd or usb option. It appears that the only options under Dell Secure Boot are internal. In July I made 3 TI 2019 boot cd's from TI on my computer. The boot disks worked then from my external cd/dvd drive. Is there a way I can boot from TI?

 

Ronald, if your boot CD's worked back in July when you tested them from your external drive, then they should still work now.  The key with any boot media is to have the drive connected before restarting the system so that it gets offered as a boot choice.

If you still don't see a boot option, then you may need to check the BIOS settings to ensure that the option to boot from CD/DVD hasn't been disabled in some way?  The manual for your laptop shows that there are settings for USB configuration which are normally enabled by default that:

Allows you to enable or disable the internal or integrated USB configuration.

The options are:

  • Enable USB Boot Support
  • Enable External USB Port

By default, all the options are enabled.