Survival Kit won't boot computers
I created a Survival Kit on a 2TB USB drive and it won't boot either the PC I created it on, or another almost identical PC. It shows the "loading windows files" bar at the bottom, and then "Starting Windows" with the animated 4-part logo pulsing-away, but it never gets beyond that and there are no activity leds pulsing on the external drive or the PC. I have to hard OFF the computer(s).
If I try to create a new Backups task with ATI2020 and use the drive as a destination, it shows it as the Blue A type i.e. that it is a Survival disk, and the MVP Assistant shows the Media Builder log as having been successful with no errors.
I opened the Rescue Media Builder under Tools and selected Simple and my 2TB drive again, and a note at the bottom says "An Acronis Survival Kit is detected on this drive. If you select Proceed, Acronsi Media Builder will attempt to overwrite only the ASK on the hidden partition w/o formatting the whole drive." but then when I Proceed the button greys-out and nothing happens and no activity on my USB disks LED.
Is there any way to delete the obviously bad 2GB ASK partition and start-over again? I do not btw want to erase the 2TB drive--it has valuable backups on it.
P.S. I see with MiniTool Partition Wizard the 2GB ACRONIS HM (FAT32) partition at the front of my 2TB drive. Can I delete it safely and try again with the ASK maybe?
Steve I can see no way to assign a drive letter to the ASK partition. MiniTool PW has a "Change letter" option but it's greyed-out, and neither does WIndows Disk Management appear to allow assignment of a letter to that partition.
:-(
EDIT: NM I tried Un-hiding it and that allows me to do what you suggested. Will keep moving, thanks!
EDIT2: Nope, same thing, gets to Starting Windows and the four-color icon pulses forever.
Any more ideas Steve?
I am trying "simply" to make a backup of a new computer by booting to ATI, and I know I could do that by installing EasyBCD to it and then pointing that to an ISO file, but I didn't want to use EasyBCD with this new computer.
But it seems I am unable to make a "normal" rescue media disk.
Tom, before trying to get the SK to work with the new computer, does it work with the one where you are creating it? (Assuming that you have not installed Acronis on the new computer?).
Hi Steve, no, it does the same thing, halts at Starting Windows. I did find another USB device here with the Survival Kit on it, made with 2019, and it works in both computers so it seems something is amiss with ATI2020, or my installation.
I did accomplish the backup I wanted to make, before upgrading a spare computer to W10, but now I am gunshy about installing 2020 to it--maybe I should install instead 2019 on it. Honestly I don't think I have tried to make a SK with 2020 before i.e. I only installed it recently. Come to think of it, should it not have told me that my SK devices were out-of-date???
Tom, I like the principle of the SK in having a bootable external drive but don't use the Acronis method for creating them for myself.
I have a 2TB external drive with a 32GB FAT32 partition that is used for booting in to a selection of different environments that was initially setup with Windows 10 installation media using the Microsoft media creation tool. I then added further .WIM files for different bootable media to a separate WIMS folder, then used BOOTICEx64_v1.3.4.0.exe to add new entries to the Windows Boot Manager for that boot media. Once setup, I can just update any .WIM files as needed by copying them to the WIMS folder.
I like options so have persisted to try to get ASK to work by uninstalling ATI2020 and reinstalling ATI2019, Used MiniTool PW to restore my failed ASK USB drive, and used ATI2019 to install the ASK to that drive, and it boots and works EXCEPT it sees all of my 2020 .tib files (yes, tib not tibx) as CORRUPT! Thankfully I still have my EasyBCD installation and can boot to any .iso I want, so can still boot to a 2020 .tib if I need to.
What a mess. Your description of W10 special boot methods, which is mostly Greek to me (hey you look like a Greek fisherman), has me asking you--should I learn that method/will it boot to .iso files, (I guess not, .wim instead huh) if I am going to migrate this computer to W10??? Or does EasyBCD continue to work well enough under W10 that I can still boot from older ATI .iso files?
Thanks for your advice Steve.
BTW your BOOTICE reference rang a bell with me and sure enough I downloaded it before, only I used it to re-format a 32GB USB stick to act as a 16GB stick (somehow). Anyway maybe I will need to learn about Windows Boot Manager....
Tom, it is possible that ATI 2019 might regard any .tib files created by 2020 or later to be corrupt as Acronis have only ever supported backwards compatibility between versions and files, not in the reverse direction.
I once attempted to learn a little Greek while living over in Cyprus but other than picking up a few simple words, it was definitely not easy!
For my multi-boot SK drive, I originally learnt about doing this from MVP Bobbo (when he was active in the forums) and decided to document the process for myself in case of senior moments which come with each year added to age! See the attached document for this.
Thank you Steve for posting the .pdf. Since I had BOOTICE handy I opened it and voila it shows my boot data that was actually made by EasyBCD!
I've never had a problem with EasyBCD, but can imagine a program with access to these boot items can cause all manner of hurt to the uninitiated. But I think after I've upgraded this particular PC to W10 I may go your route cuz "less proprietary" than EasyBCD.
Of course, the ATI items in my list are all .iso files.
I will be 73 in a couple months, and know all about "senior moments" thus am surprised I do even recall the one Greek word that I rather recklessly became familiar with. Yes, it's ouzo!
Tom
mSATA is an internal drive for this Dell laptop, Sandisk a 128GB always-installed USB stick, and IOCREST is an external 2TB USB hard drive:
Tom, in my PDF document, the images from BOOTICE of the BCD entries are all from the external drive used for booting in my custom survival kit environments.
Sounds like you will be catching me up on age in a couple of months before I add another digit to my age!
I never got into Ouzo directly but like an occasional tipple of Sambuca which is a cousin!