Survival Kit Creation - A success story

Ian, I am happy to hear the success story!

It was the issue with locking the drive, according to the latest logs that you have sent us. We have indeed fixed multiple issue causes (as it was reported a lot during the Beta1 and Beta2).

But this is a hard-to-totally-fix issue as it depends on Windows being able/not able to lock the drive as well.

"The Kit was created on a WD Elements 3TB USB HDD (2.5")." Is it USB STICK / USB FLASH DRIVE ?  OR Is it normal HDD ? 

Ammy gml, USB flash drives are not supported for the Survival Kit creation:

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2019/#41690.html

Normal 2.5" HDD in and USB "container". 

Ian

Renata Gubaydullina wrote:

Ammy gml, USB flash drives are not supported for the Survival Kit creation:

https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2019/#41690.html

That page doesn't explicitly say that USB flash drives are not supported. Where does it say this? What about external hard drives that are connected via USB? Is Ian's success a fluke, or is this supported? What about hard drives that are a NAS, connected via Ethernet? It also doesn't say anything about the different options, such as WinPE, or using the Windows SDK. What's the difference? What's the difference between creating a "Survival Kit" and using the Acronis Media Builder?

Saverio, welcome to these User Forums.

The ATIH 2019 User Guide says:

An Acronis Survival Kit combines both components so that you could have a single device that has everything that you need to recover your computer in case of a failure. It is an external hard disk drive that contains both the Acronis bootable media files and a backup of your system partition, entire computer, or any disk backup.

As a device for an Acronis Survival Kit you can use an external hard disk drive that is larger than 32 GB and has NTFS, FAT32, or exFAT file system. If the drive has another file system, Acronis True Image 2019 suggests formatting the drive.

The key requirement here is that the external drive has to be recognised as being a removable drive, which most USB drives are.  The other requirement is that you should be able to boot the computer from that same drive, so you cannot use a remote NAS connected or other network drive (there is no PXE boot ability here!).

The way the Survival Kit is launched is the key difference between this feature and using the Acronis Rescue Media Builder tool.  The Survival Kit is offered to your when you are making a backup to a qualifying drive.  The Media Builder tool can work with any drive that can be selected within the tool menu options.  Note: to use this method with an existing external drive, you would need to create a small 2GB FAT32 partition at the start of the drive and allocate a drive letter to that partition to make it selectable.  The Survival Kit process will do this last step for the user.

- the WinPE N: drive shown is a 2GB FAT32 partition on my own external USB HDD drive

Thanks for the response. I did read those paragraphs, which is what prompted my question. It was not my intention to hijack this thread but I found one the responses to Ian from Renata unclear and wanted to get clarification, as I'm trying to do the same thing Ian did.

Renata claimed that USB flash drives are not supported, but the KB article doesn't explicitly say this. You also said: "The key requirement here is that the external drive has to be recognised as being a removable drive", which USB drives are.  

The other requirement is that "you should be able to boot the computer from that same drive, so you cannot use a remote NAS connected or other network drive (there is no PXE boot ability here!)." USB flash drives are clearly recognized as removable drives, and they can be bootable, so I don't understand Renata's statement that USB flash drives are not usable. With respect to the comment regarding partitions, you can create partitions on USB flash drives just like you can on "regular" hard drives. 

I did, in fact, try to use an external USB flash drive. The Survival Kit procedure allowed me to select it, but it eventually errored out saying something about failing to copy files. It was not clear what the issue was, since I am able to use the flash drive just fine. Is the size the issue? The KB article says "you can use an external hard disk drive that is larger than 32 GB and has NTFS, FAT32, or exFAT file system". So if I have a 32GB USB flash drive, logic tells you it's not larger than 32GB. So do I need a 64GB flash drive? 

If USB flash drives are not supported at all, I would suggest making that explicitly clear in the KB article.

Please see KB 58108: Acronis products: using USB sticks with more than 32GB capacity - which may help explain some of the issues with using larger USB sticks.  Again, this mainly applies when the USB stick is FAT32 formatted.  For the Survival Kit, only the first 2GB uses FAT32 as required for the boot media, the remainder can be formatted as NTFS.

Note: I do not have any USB sticks larger than 16GB so have not tried using one in this scenario - all my kits use HDD's and the smallest is 160GB.

ATI 2019 will successfully back-up to large USB flash drive. I backup my Dell notebook to a 120gig Kingston Traveller. However, that drive does not have recovery media on it. It is configured to run backup whenever the USB stick is attached. 

I understand that USB flash drives are not supported for Survival Kit owing to difficulties of safely repartitioning USB stick under Windows. The Survival kit resizes the existing partition and creates a new 2gig FAT33 partition to which the recover environment is transferred.

Ian

I did extensive testing of the Survival Kit feature during the beta phase of TI 2019.  I found early on that USB flash drives would not work with the feature.  USB attached disk drives however work fine in most cases.

The USB Device Class, which is the specification standard for USB storage devices, has many sub classes.  One of those is Mass Storage Class.  USB Flash drives, for the most part, use this specification.   Another sub class of the specification is the SCSI Adapter Class.  Modern USB attached hard drives use this specification. 

Both USB flash drives and USB attached hard drives report themselves as Removable devices.

Since there are issues with drive locking and consequently drive partitioning of devices in the sub class Mass Storage,  I am convinced that the survival Kit feature looks for sub class SCSI Adapter for USB Storage devices before the feature becomes available.

Be advised that some hard drive enclosures/adapters may not adhere to the SCSI Adapter class specification and therefore would not work as a Survival Kit device. 

Examples:

I used a WD My Book USB 3.0 2TB hard drive with TI 2019 which happily offered to create a Survival Kit on the drive which I did so successfully. 

I also used a Best Buy Insignia USB 3.0 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure to mount a Samsung 850 EVO SSD drive and attached it to my computer which TI 2019 again happily offered to make into a Survival Kit which I did and that was also successful.

In contrast, I used a self powered USB 3.0 ASMedia adapter connected to a 2.5 inch Samsung EVO SSD connected to my computer and TI 2019 would NOT offer to make the drive a Survival Kit.  The adapter in this case adhered to the Mass Storage sub class not as a SCSI Adapter device.

Thanks, Enchantech, for providing the results you found during beta testing. Now it's starting to make more sense.

It would be great if Acronis could officially comment on your supposition about the USB device classes. 

I have done some more investigating on this and have found that curiously, Flash Drives show up in MSInfo32 as Drives whereas External USB disks and Internal disks show up as Drives and more importantly Disks.

This could also be the determining factor in which devices the application uses to determine usage of the Survival Kit feature.  I must correct myself in the above commentary where I wrote that "Both USB flash drives and USB attached hard drives report themselves as Removable devices."  That is incorrect. Flash drives report as removable whereas externally attached USB disks report as Fixed disks thus, those that report as Removable are not eligible for Survival Kit creation.

I've been trying to create a Survival Kit, and get stuck at the "Plug in your external drive screen". Nothing happens, and my only option is the Back button, OK is greyed out.

Any ideas what I need to do? I've read around and I know that Windows sees the drive as removable, and I can add and remove it from Windows. Only Acronis does not see it.

Thanks

Gerald, it is best if the USB drive is connected before starting the process to create a survival kit.

Also:

01:  What is your operating system and version?  You can only create a survival kit on some drives if using Windows 10 1803 and later.

02:  What type of USB drive is it - Flash (thumb) drive, or an external USB drive.  That may determine if it can be used as a survival kit or not as some flash drives cannot be used, and especially if not using a specific version of Windows 10 or higher

03:  How is the usb drive formatted?  FAT32, NTFS or exFAT?  

That said, you can also create rescue media on any USB drive.  This normally wipes all data at creation though, but once it's created, you can put data back on it.  Otherwise, if you don't want to wipe data already on it, you can repartition 2GB at the front of the drive using a free tool like minitool partition wizard.  Then, use the rescue media builder and point it to that partition (note, that partition must be FAT32)

Thanks for your response. I've interpolated some answers

01:  What is your operating system and version?  You can only create a survival kit on some drives if using Windows 10 1803 and later.

Windows 10 1803, updated 

02:  What type of USB drive is it - Flash (thumb) drive, or an external USB drive.  That may determine if it can be used as a survival kit or not as some flash drives cannot be used, and especially if not using a specific version of Windows 10 or higher

External USB 500GB SSD

03:  How is the usb drive formatted?  FAT32, NTFS or exFAT?  

NTFS

That said, you can also create rescue media on any USB drive.  This normally wipes all data at creation though, but once it's created, you can put data back on it.  Otherwise, if you don't want to wipe data already on it, you can repartition 2GB at the front of the drive using a free tool like minitool partition wizard.  Then, use the rescue media builder and point it to that partition (note, that partition must be FAT32)

I've made a recovery CD, but I think that this Survival Kit is a better idea?

 

Since my original post I have got past the previous sticking point, and started creating the Survival Kit, but then come up against the "Unable to copy products" error. I have tried again and am back to ATI not recognising my USB drive. I despair, when ATI works it's the best, but it's a torture getting it to work as intended. 

Gerald

Gerald, if you are getting 'Unable to copy products' then I would recommend trying a Repair Install of ATI 2019 to see if that resolves that issue.  Note: you should be running with Administrator privileges when using ATI.

To do a Repair install, download the latest full installer and run this to install over the top of what is already installed without doing any uninstall.

Thanks very much Steve Smith, that worked a treat. I'm much happier about ATI 2019 now.

Gerald, that is good to read, thanks for the feedback.