Acronis True Image Home 2011 - MBR Destroyed After Restore
I have the following partition layout for OS
1. WinXP 32 Primary Active
2. Win 7 32 Primary
3. Win 7 32 Primary
I had a nice boot screen where I could select any of the OS.
Now I had to recover partition 1 WinXP. The result was that only WinXP 32 could be started. One of the Win 7 32 partitions was removed from the boot screen and the remaining one could not be started anymore.
When I restored XP I did not select MBR. So what can I do better to avoid such a nightmare in the future?
The XP partition was restored as active - it was always the active one. But since I use the boot menu it is not important at all.
Yes, the image was created after all 3 OS were installed and working properly. In addition to this I did not select to restore the MBR when I recovered the WinXP partition. So my idea was that the MBR will not be changed. Is this wrong?
I did the startup repair. It just gets on my nerves to set up everything again - including my nice boot menu. But it might not be that easy for not experienced users to fix it. So how can one avoid such a mess? To not select the restore of the MBR did not help. But what then?
Are you using the Windows boot manager or something else?
I haven't tested TI 2011 in a standard Windows multi-boot setup. I do know that some versions of TI are not very good at handling multiple operating systems. Usually, only one or two would boot after a restore and the others would require a fix.
I use the Win7 boot manager. The one that is created when you repair the partitions with the Win7 DVD.
But your experience is the same as mine. And if I cannot do anything better to avoid this than this needs a fix form Acronis. But I still hope that I did something wrong. Cannot believe that they would put a product on the market that cannot handle a simple thing like the Windows boot manager. And they made a flag there to select if you want to restore the MBR. But anyhow the MBR should have been okay for this partition layout because it was saved with the tib file. So it should work.
But at least it did not destroy the extended partition table entries like 2010 very often...and it did not create the endless bad sectors on my WinXP FAT32 drive like the 2010 version on my RAID 0 did - they doubled with every backup/restore. I always had to resize the partition to get rid of them. In 2010 only the boot version worked for me. So 2011 is not e real new version. It is a fix for 2010 with a downgrade in the GUI quality.