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Acronis Recovery Failure

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Hello. I recently bought a WD My Cloud Home Duo backup box. The salesmen at Currys told me that, although the standard connection was via a wireless network, the box could be directly connected to my Toshiba Satellite P50 laptop computer via an ethernet cable. In fact, that information was wrong. Not knowing this, I tried to do so and a few minutes later my Windows 10 system froze. I disconnected the ethernet cable without switching off the MCHD and performed a hard reset. Windows 10 loaded apparently as normal but the touchpad could no longer be turned off. (Normally whenever I opened the lid of the laptop I had to press Fn +F5 to turn off the touchpad.) I tried various suggestions found online without success. Even removing the touchpad driver made no difference. Another difference was that all my restore points had vanished. I decided to use Acronis to recover my system. As a precaution, I made a full backup of the system yesterday, and then I ran Acronis from a USB memory stick. I had made a full backup in August and an incremental backup in early November. I am pretty ignorant of Acronis processes in general, so I supposed I would have to restore the August backup first, and then the early November afterwards. But having restored the August backup, I thought I would check to see if the touchpad problem was solved. But Windows didn't load and I was taken into the Toshiba recovery system. I used the Wizard as an option, but the reset option didn't work. I am now wiping the HD in the hope that Windows can be re-installed. I suspect that the ethernet connection might have done some real damage. Can anyone offer any suggestions? Yours desperately and extremely gratefully. 

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Robert, sorry to read of the woes you have been dealing with recently.

I can only assume that the Curry's person had no clue as I have never heard of anyone using a direct Ethernet connection being used between a PC and any external storage boxes!  I would suggest looking on the back of the WD box to see if it offers a USB port, probably USB 'A' which is a more square type connector (with one side having rounded edges to key it so that it only fits one way round!).

Next, I am puzzled that connecting the WD box via Ethernet would have any impact on Windows 10 at all, let alone cause the issues you are seeing here - I would have assumed that Windows would have seen no connection on the network cable because of looking for a DHCP server which I wouldn't have expected the WD box to have?  Anyway, sounds like that is now water under the bridge!

The next check point is to establish how your Toshiba Satellite P50 laptop would normally boot from the BIOS into Windows?  This will depend in part on the age of the laptop - most modern PC's now boot using UEFI (with or without Secure Boot enabled), but older PC's boot in Legacy mode.

If your laptop is no longer booting into Windows, then the ways of establishing the boot mode are a little more basic!

If you open the BIOS settings on the laptop by pressing the F2 key on start, then look at the Boot device settings.  If you see 'Windows Boot Manager' as the main boot option, this is a UEFI boot system.  If you see the name / make of your internal disk drive, then it is Legacy boot.

This is important as when doing any recovery you need to boot the Acronis rescue media (USB memory stick) in the same BIOS boot mode as used by Windows 10.  All rescue media is capable of booting in both Legacy & UEFI modes!

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

Having established the correct BIOS boot mode and booted from the rescue media in that mode, then you just need to select the most recent backup image file to be restored, and Acronis will walk backwards through any other files included in that backup version chain.  So you would just pick your November backup file.  Note: with ATI 2020, assuming the backup was created using the same version this should be a .TIBX backup file for a Disks & Partitions backup image.  You cannot recover Windows from a Files & Folders backup image!

KB 63295: Acronis True Image 2020: How to restore your computer with WinPE-based or WinRE-based media

Hello, Steve.

Thank you for your help and time.

Everything was already UEFI. I chose the incremental backup and recovered my system.

Many, many thanks.

Robert