Problems creating Acronis Rescue Media with Disk Format error
Going round and round in circles here trying to create the Rescue Media/Tools on an external backup drive as suggested by Acronis 2019.
Had no problem creating this on an old Samsung 2Tb external drive. Doing so on a slightly newer Seagate Expansion 3Tb drive lead at the end of the creation process to a Failure message, saying something (sorry can't remember it exactly) about the drive format being incompatible.
As well as reformatting the drive (full/slow), I've used a partition program to convert the drive from MBR to the supposedly newer/better GPT (as my OS drive is) which I had assumed was the 'format' issue, but I note Acronis seems to reverse it back to MBR whenever I create the recovery media on it (apparently a 200Mb partition) and I always get an error at the end of creation process a few minutes later that it had not worked. Rebooting and trying to boot from the drive isn't possible as this drive is not listed on the Boot option screen, unlike others (a mixture of MBR & GPT) some of which I know have no bootable media on them. What's the problem with this HDD?
Various detailed scans including Seatools fail to find anything wrong with the external drive, which has always worked perfectly. Have tried these steps various times including deleting partitions and starting from scratch.
Really confused about what is going wrong?


- Log in to post comments

Hi Steve, Many thanks for your suggestion, which I will try shortly. It does ring of commonsense, but also of an Acronis bug in what should just work as advertised. Before I do however, can you clarify what you mean by 'MVP Custom ATIPE tool'? Is that the more elaborate set of rescue tools created from the \Tools options or something else? ATI only seems to allocate 200Mb not 2Gb to its recovery volume.
And please, should I be using MBR or GPT? I thought former was yesterday's file system, but ATI seems to revert it from GPT to MBR without asking when creating the rescue volume?
- Log in to post comments

Roy, it shouldn't matter about using MBR or GPT other than understanding the maximum partition sizes that these recognise, so you should be using GPT for any drive larger than 2TB in size as above this size is not recognised by MBR.
See webpage: Understanding the 2 TB Limit in Windows Storage
The MVP Custom ATIPE tool is provided via the Acronis Community Tools KB document and was created to enhance the types of rescue media features available, including providing a means of creating WinPE media for 32-bit systems when needed.
- Log in to post comments

Roy22 wrote:Had no problem creating this on an old Samsung 2Tb external drive. Doing so on a slightly newer Seagate Expansion 3Tb drive lead at the end of the creation process to a Failure message, saying something (sorry can't remember it exactly) about the drive format being incompatible.
Hello Roy, take a look at the article Survival Kit disk partition for backups is limited to 2TB on BIOS-booted systems , probably it explains the issue you're facing.
- Log in to post comments