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Acronis True Image HD bricked my thumb drive

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I just purchased a new OCZ Vector SSD which came with Acronis True Image HD. To make sure my backup worked, I was going to image it back using a USB boot drive. I used the tool in the software to set up my USB as a boot drive, but now the drive will not register anywhere. I can't see it under manage my computer, it won't boot to it, I can't see it in diskpart.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can recover the drive?

Thanks,
John Vickers

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Make/model of your "USB boot drive"? USB 2.0 or 3.0? Have you tried plugging it to another PC?

Super Talent 8GB USB 2.0 drive. I have 3 of them, the other 2 still work on my computer. I have tried the one that isn't recognized on several computers, none of them recognize it. I have tried the HP format utility for thumb drives and it does not see it either.

Try formatting it with Windows, select say FAT32.

If it can't be recognized by any computer i.e. invisible even to BIOS then it does seem to be bricked. Can't imagine how ATIH might do this, and maybe it was just a coincident failure, but if I were you I'd try another of your drives but this time use the YUMI multiboot software and put the Acronis bootable .iso (from your Downloads registration page) on it.

I used to use XBOOT and now I use instead YUMI and I put many multiple versions of ATIH boot isos on a USB thumbdrive along with other useful stuff e.g. DiskDirector and Memtest and other self-boot utility disks. Works great.

Sorry you seem to have a dead thumbdrive.

So here is the shitty thing. Acronis takes no responsibility because it is OEM software, and OCZ takes no responsibility because it is Acronis software. The bottom line is that the Acronis software bricked my thumbdrive, did not give any warnings that this is a possibility, and will not replace the drive. So, am I out the cost of the drive because they refuse to take responsibility for their faulty software?

I would love to get some feedback from an Acronis rep about this.

Flash drives do fail. They will fail when in use, reading or writing. It's possible that it just happened to fail whn you were writing to it with True Image. I've never heard of True Image bricking a flash drive, so yours may simply have chosen that moment to fail; coincidence.

John Vickers wrote:

So here is the shitty thing. Acronis takes no responsibility because it is OEM software, and OCZ takes no responsibility because it is Acronis software. The bottom line is that the Acronis software bricked my thumbdrive, did not give any warnings that this is a possibility, and will not replace the drive. So, am I out the cost of the drive because they refuse to take responsibility for their faulty software?

I would love to get some feedback from an Acronis rep about this.

Now you have really confused matters here. The subject is a bricked thumb drive, which you said was a Super Talent, and now you cite instead OCZ i.e. that it is your SSD that was bricked. So which is it???

The OCZ website is full of folks who've suffered bricked SSDs, and in fact *I* have/had a OCZ SSD that was bricked (and which OCZ replaced, and should replace yours under warranty) and of course none of these incidents had anything to do with Acronis.

You'll probably get no feedback until you clarify yourself.

Same exact thing just happened to me - Wanted to try out Acronis - went to create a bootable USB drive that was working previously.  Instantly after failing to create the bootable media the thumb drive was no longer accessible.  Tried with 2 different thumb drives same thing - 2 bricks now.  WTF.  Uninstall!

Mike, welcome to these public User Forums.

This forum topic is over 7 years old and untouched in all that time!

What size of USB sticks / thumb drives have you been trying?  The recommendation is to use media that is 32GB or smaller, down to 2GB minimum for the latest versions of ATI, and the media needs to be formatted as FAT32.

You can try cleaning up your USB media using the following commands from an Administrator command prompt.

diskpart
list disk   (to identify USB drive, i.e. 1)
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
exit

Note: please ensure that the correct USB disk is selected if using the above.  Diskpart does not ask confirmation before cleaning the selected drive and will wipe any partitions / data on that drive!

Finally, you don't mention what version of ATI you have being using here?  The recommended way to create rescue media is by using the Acronis Rescue Media Builder tool provided in the installed application (with the understanding that this will use the whole USB drive media selected).

See KB 2201: Support for OEM Versions of Acronis Products which applies to all OEM versions of ATI supplied with hardware purchases.