Restoring when MBR is trashed
I have been trying to restore my image for 4 hours. I always keep my backup current, made the rescue usb drive, however, when try to use these together nothing appears as any of the acronis instructions. I get a completely different work flow from the min acronis opens. If I select to recover wholes disks and partitions, it wants me to select a location for each of the partitions (NTFS (OS) (C), Track 0, EFI System partition - none of this is in any of the documentation I can find. When I try to select a location for these, I can pick disk 1 NTFS Unlabeled (C) but then for the next partition, I take it the EFI partition, I am out of destinations.
Also, the location popup window opens at 2"x2" and cant be resized - really?
Am I the only one who cannot get this product to work?
Steve,
Thank you for the information! I can tell you that I've read through all of the Acronis help guides for the past 2 days. My system is a laptop and now my other drives with extremely important information on them are bitlocked. I can tell you not one of the articles I've read, which include "recovering your system to a new disk under bootable media" mentions the add new disk option.
I have tried restoring drive 1 (3 partitions, efi, mbr, c) over a dozen times; I have tried recreating the partitions using windows installation, I have tried removing the partitions and restoring to unallocated spaces, this morning I went out and purchased a new hard drive and tried backing up to it on the same computer - nothing works - this is absolutely ridiculous!!!
I guess I'll look for yet another set of instructions on how to use the add new disk option however when you pay for backup and recovery software there is no way in hell it should be this difficult. I've worked in software for 14 years as an SQA engineer - let me tell you this product was not even close to properly tested.
I've attached the errors I continually received while trying to recover to my original drive.
Update - I cannot use add new disk because the computer acronis is on is trashed.; even the acronis directions on this assume you can log into you computer - seriously? I cannot use add new disk as I cannot run a cmd prompt as my computer has crashed. Any other ideas?
Thank you
Mark
Mark, my first recommendation given your statements above about other drives with extremely important information on them is to disconnect all other drives apart from the target for the recovery operation and the drive holding the backup image being used, plus the boot media.
Doing the above will ensure that those drives are safely out of harms way!
Information about using the Add new drive option is in the ATI 2021 User Guide and is used to prepare new non-initialised drives to the system, but can also be used to re-initialise a drive prior to using it for recovery.
Starting the recovery process using a new drive is a good direction to try and one that I have used multiple times for my own laptop and using various different versions of ATI, including 2021.
The null reference error is one that I have never encountered and only recollect seeing on very rare occasions in these forums but without any clear reason to pass on to you! I can only assume that this is possibly coming from some factor associated with the original problem drive.
Do you remember at what point during the recovery process the above error was thrown?
Update - I cannot use add new disk because the computer acronis is on is trashed.; even the acronis directions on this assume you can log into you computer - seriously? I cannot use add new disk as I cannot run a cmd prompt as my computer has crashed. Any other ideas?
You can use this tool option when booted from the Acronis Rescue Media - so can be done on a totally isolated and disconnected system!
See topic: Steve migrate NVMe SSD where I documented the process that I used when upgrading my laptop NVMe SSD drive using Backup & Restore which includes using the Add new disk tool and all is done using rescue media.
The biggest problem here is my main drive is partitioned into C and D; I have very important documents on D which is the reason I purchased acronis. I just tried to remove all other drives and restore to the new drive I bought, the files looked like they've been copied over however it will not boot. If acronis cannot restore to a brand new drive with all other drives removed from the system then what exactly can it do? I will try add new drive right now on C and see if it works however at this point I have lost any hope.
Mark, please stop before using Add new disk on a drive with 2 partitions if you want to keep the second partition!!!
Add new disk will wipe the whole target disk drive, removing all partitions and all data contained therein!
Stepping back a little here: What backup do you have here that you are trying to recover from, when was this backup created and what does it include?
A Windows disk drive normally will contain at least 3 or 4 partitions where 2 or 3 of these are hidden / system partitions vital to how the system boots correctly.
To recover successfully, you need a backup created prior to the issue causing the laptop to fail to boot properly! Acronis cannot turn a backup of a failed system into a working system.
I thankfully backed up the healthy drive the day before it crashed