Boot Rescue Media Not Recognized - Other Rescue Options?
Hello,
My Dell Latitude 6420 laptop would not boot after a Windows 10 update. Through the laptop recovery system, I undid the latest Windows update without the apps. The laptop now boots to the last good version of Windows, but without the apps. I want to restore the hard drive to the last full disk back-up file that I have stored on an external drive.
To do this, on my desktop I formatted a 16 GB USB stick and then followed the Arconis rescue media builder instructions to create a general rescue file to boot the laptop into the Arconis recovery program. The laptop did not recognize the Arconis rescue boot files on the USB drive. I then tried to create a rescue DVD disc for the CD Rom drive on my desktop. My computer would not burn the Arconis rescue files, it kept saying the blank DVD was busy. I then created an ISO image of the rescue boot files, and was able to burn that to a blank DVD. The laptop is not recognizing these DVD rescue files either.
With both the USB and ISO DVD rescue files, the laptop simply goes to Windows boot and ignores those media.
I have tried every combination possible in the BIOS set up to boot it from both of these rescue media, in both Legacy and UEFI modes, and the laptop is just not recognizing these media.
Any ideas on how to fix this using the rescue media I have created?
I am also thinking that I could take out the laptop hard drive and connect it to my desktop computer and try to back-up it up using the Acronis program on the desktop, but before I do that I want to get some input relative to the boot sectors of the laptop hard drive. I would not want to change the Windows boot files, just restore the operating system and applications intact.
FYI, every time I do a back-up, the file created is a full back of the entire disk.
I thank you in advance for your suggestions.
Hello Steve,
Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my post.
The build of ATI 2020 on my desktop is 22510, and the file format of the laptop back-up is .tibx, located on an external hard drive. The rescue media were created with this build.
The USB drive had been used for other things previously. Before I burned the rescue files to it, I deleted all files from it and then formatted it with the regular Windows 10 formatting process. Do I need to reformat it again using the Diskpart command? Not sure why one format process is recommended over another.
Also, I am not understanding why the rescue media that I burned to the blank DVD are not being recognized by the laptop???
I am attaching the information from the laptop msinfo32 for your review. I have the BIOS currently configured to the legacy (Heredado in Spanish) configuration. Let me know if you need anything further.
Msconfig32 info from the laptop.
Cristobal, thanks for the answers to my questions.
ATI 2020 #22510 is 2 builds before the final one that Acronis released, so would recommend that you update to the final #25700 version and create the rescue media using the same.
The regular Windows USB format can be ok if doing a full format, not a quick format but if the USB media has been used to boot any other application, then it may not fully clean the media, hence why using diskpart is recommended.
DVD media can be problematic in my experience - some PC's & laptops seem to be able to boot from DVD with no problem but others will not. I have found that USB media is more reliable for newer systems. DVD's have the question as to the type (+R / -R / RW) and whether the optical media drive will recognise them correctly.
If you are nervous about using diskpart, then try using the MVP Custom PE builder script (link below) to create the media, as this does format the USB media as part of the process and just asks you to provide the drive letter, i.e. F: for where your USB media is found.
Hello Steve,
I updated today my ATI 2020 version from 22510 to the most recent version, 25700.
I then purchased two new 16 gb USB memory sticks, and did a full format of one of them with the standard Windows formatting tool. I then created the recovery files using Acronis, and attempted to boot off the USB drive.
The end result of trying to boot from the USB stick recovery files was failure.
The Windows pane appeared, and the circle below it rotated endlessly. No boot to Windows, and no boot to the Acronis recovery files.
I also purchased today 10 new CD-R Verbatim CD´s. After updating the Acronis version, I burned an ISO image of the recovery files to one of the new CD´s.
The end result of trying to boot from the recovery files on this CD was failure.
The Windows pane appeared, but unlike trying to boot from the USB stick, there was no circle. It just remained frozen. No boot to Windows, and no boot to the Acronis recovery files on the CD.
Any ideas?
I do have a question: Is it possible to remove the hard drive from the laptop, and restore the .tibx back-up of the full disk using the desktop computer ???
I also would like to make clear, that I am able to get into Windows on the laptop, however with all apps erased. I suppose I could spend hours re-installing the apps to the laptop, but the thought of having to do that is highly irritating. Restoring from an Acronis back-up is supposed to take care of that problem, and that is not happening at this point in time.
As an FYI, I am attaching to this message a capture of the BIOS start-up sequence. Everything appears to be in order.
Hello Cristobal, sorry that these problems are continuing!
I do have a question: Is it possible to remove the hard drive from the laptop, and restore the .tibx back-up of the full disk using the desktop computer ???
You can try this but there is no guarantee that the restored laptop drive will boot correctly plus there is a risk that ATI will detect different hardware and try to install drivers for it.
I would suggest, if your time permits, doing a couple of further tests to confirm that this issue with booting from either DVD or USB media is only happening for Acronis and not something that would affect other application media.
Are you able to boot from a Windows install DVD or USB into the initial panels of that media?
If you don't have a copy of the Windows 10 install media, then download this from the Windows 10 Download website using the second option shown to 'Create Windows 10 installation media' where you can create either a USB stick or DVD media.
An alternative test is to Activate the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager which will give an F11 prompt when booting to allow you to launch the offline Linux rescue media environment, which would let you recover your backup .tibx file.
I would recommend making a further backup of the current working Windows 10 system in case you need to get back to this starting point, but use a new unique name for the backup so that you don't risk overwriting or losing the earlier backup. Ideally store it on a different drive.
Hi Steve,
I am thinking now that the problem may actually have been with my laptop rather than an Acronis problem.
This morning it launched Windows just fine (without the applications, in the last best configuration), but then when I started it up again this afternoon I have gotten the Blue Screen of Death, and am not able to do anything with it now after repeated attempts to boot it.
I bought the laptop almost 9 years ago, so it has become obvious today that it is time to get a new one. This one gave me great service until recently and I have no regrets about the purchase.
At least I can access the program installation files that I have in the laptop´s back-up .tibx file, so not all is lost.
Thank you so much for the time you have spent trying to diagnose the problem, and hopefully this thread will be useful to others.
Cristobal, I understand what you mean about older laptops as I still have a couple of fairly 'ancient' ones that I use for various testing purposes, but provided that the core hardware (motherboard, CPU and memory plus display controller) are all ok, then I would suggest trying a different disk drive and doing a clean install of Windows 10 on it after running a full disk drive check of the current drive.
I have used Hiren's Boot CD for doing this type of testing with older hardware, as it has a good range of testing tools that can be launched from either a DOS environment, or else from a Windows 10 PE desktop.
Obviously if you cannot get any type of boot media to be recognised and launched, then the above will be no use either.