Unable to lock the disk. Boot your computer from a linux-based media
I have recently upgraded my ATI 2019 to 2020. With OS Windows 10 Pro 64. Whenever I try to recover whole partition using Acronis Bootable Media, Acronis window gives me error “Unable to lock the disk. Boot your computer from a Linux-based bootloader media”. Shutting down while holding the shift key with no success.


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Dear Steve, thank you for your reply. Using linux-based bootable media, it did not detect pc partitions, and only external hard drives are available as destination partitions. I have gathered the log.
Lastly I created a ticket for this issue.
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What type of PC partitions / internal disk drive are not being detected by the Linux media?
The only other method that I know will work when this lock issue is encountered is to use the 'Add new disk' option in the WinPE rescue media, selecting the correct target drive and setting this to the correct partition format (GPT or MBR) then leaving the drive as unformatted. This will then not have any locks to prevent ATI from restoring the disk backup to it.
The key downside to doing this is that you have to recover the whole disk, so cannot use this approach to just restore a single partition!
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Thank you very much Steve. Yes selecting "add new disk" resolved the issue.
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I am currently facing this issue. Windows 10. When running recovery, I select the drive and right click and select Recovery
I then select Disk 1 and verify all others below are checked. Click next, and I get the above error message.
I have tried to add a new disk, but that does not resolve the issue. Instead I am just getting the same error message.
This happened on multiple computers.
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Julie, welcome to these public User Forums.
Sorry but need to start from the beginning here with your issue.
What exactly are you trying to do and how are you trying to do it?
What are you trying to recover, are you trying to do this from within Windows, or are you booting your computer using Acronis Rescue Media? If the latter, which type of rescue media are you using?
For the ATI 2018 & later version 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) or created from the .ISO CD image download from your Acronis Account page.
Are you recovering to the same / original drive the backup was made from, or to a different drive? If the latter, is the different drive of the same size as the original? What size of data is being restored?
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Not sure why this thread died, but I am having this issue right now with TI2021.
I created a brand new TI2021 boot media DVD disk using the simple method. I rebooted to the DVD, which gave me the option to run TI. I selected clone disk, and then selected my SSD EVO 850 (500GB) as my source drive. I waited for a bit and it came back with the error described in this thread ("Unable to lock the disk. Boot your computer from a Linux-based bootable media and try again.").
So it appears this issue has walked over from TI2020 to TI2021. Yes, I know I can clone a disk under Windows, but I wanted to use the tools TI provides and take the opportunity to get a clean clone without other stuff going on with Windows.
Apparently I can't. I don't have any Linux based stuff, so I guess I am dead in the water on this. Anyone at Acronis looked into this since 2020 version?
Now I am actually scared I could not recover my system should I ever need to...
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Craig, have you read through and tried the suggestions in the earlier posts in this topic?
The source disk can be 'locked' for various reasons including by booting into the Acronis Rescue Media when the PC has not been fully shutdown, i.e. is in a hybrid sleep state akin to hibernation. Doing a full shutdown by pressing / holding down a Shift key when clicking on Shutdown may help resolve this issue.
What are you cloning to here? Is this a disk drive that already contains a previous clone of the OS, if so, then wiping that target disk before doing a new clone can be helpful or else using the option in the Rescue Media > Tools > Add new disk and selecting the correct partition scheme (GPT or MBR) to match the source disk drive.
The Linux based rescue media can be created via the Advanced option of the Rescue Media Builder tool and doesn't require any Linux knowledge or skills. It is the media that ATI was using from the beginning with version 7.0 but they are now moving away from since 2018 in favour of using Windows PE media, in line with their competitors.
If you are concerned about being able to recover, then I would strongly recommend using Backup and Recovery over using Cloning. Making regular Backups from within Windows using the scheduler is going to give you many more recovery options than doing an occasional clone, plus Backup is far more economical in disk storage needs. I can store perhaps as many as a dozen backup images on a single disk drive versus only having one clone copy! See the link in my signature for a full description of the differences between Backup and Clone.
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I had the issue , tried 3 times and got a lock , my goal was to clone ssd with only 7% health to a new one, clone proces ended with succes, switched the drives and al good.
did not use the Linux rescue i this had not succeeded a had a image that i made earlier and would have used that, but is was not necessary
Windows server is running and ssd health is at 100%.
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