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Has Acronis USB Bootable Rescue ever worked in any versions of the program?

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I have Acronis TI 2013 build 6514 and have gone through many trial and error hoops to succeed in making my Bootable Rescue USB thumb drive boot up with Windows 7. What I've read that True Image doesn't create a MBR on the USB when making the USB Rescue Media within TI tools. When viewing the content of the USB there is only one folder named ' Recovery Manager' and no MBR.

The bottom line is that I would purchase Acronis True Image 2015 if I knew that making a USB Bootable Rescue drive works. In my searching of FAQ's, Tech support, and forums I've seen no definitive answer that anyone has successfully accomplished it?

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You are correct that an MBR is not created on the USB drive making the ISO boot impossible if an MBR is not written to the drive manually first.

I have found the best way to run the ISO is completely from within RAM. This is doable by using a boot loader to extract and load the contents of an ISO file into RAM memory. This can be done using grub4dos and works extremely well.

Have a look at the link below for details on using grub4dos to boot an ISO in RAM.

http://themudcrab.com/acronis_grub4dos.php

The 2013, 2014, and 2015 Acronis USB rescue media have all booted successfully on all my systems. What method did you use to created your rescue USB drive? There should be many more files in the root directory of the drive in addition to the Recovery Manager folder.

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282897-120862.png 68.63 KB

Hi Joey,

I have created individual USB boot media sticks that contain the resultant files in your attachment. Booting them is a bag of mixed results however on my 5 machines. Some boot fine others refuse. I attribute that to the bios of each machine. In general terms a UEFI bios requires boot from a UEFI prepared USB stick, a non UEFI bios machine should boot from a non UEFI prepared USB stick.

I have one machine out of the 5 total that refused to boot from a USB stick no matter what I tried. This was so frustrating that I decided to go the route I suggested above. The end result is that all of my machines will boot from the grub4dos boot USB stick and I have the added benefit of having multiple ISO files on the stick which can be run as well.

Not to say that this is the right solution for everyone but for myself at least I find it effective and very convenient.

I do agree that the poster should explore the why his prepared device does not work. There might be other issues there that need to be addressed and may be uncovered in doing so.

Your comments are always welcomed and I look forward to anything you can add here.

I want to thank you for your reply. I will probably try tomorrow and follow the guide to create a bootable USB flash drive. It looks to be pretty straight forward although I'm a little confused if I'm suppose to first use grub4dos the to make flash drive bootable, then whether I copy the Acronis.iso file, or just the files contained within the ISO to the flash drive?

Thanks Joey for the reply. With TI 2013 I created an ISO file since the program didn't show my USB stick. When I opened up the Recovery Manager folder within the Acronis.iso file I saw exactly what you show in the usbmedia.png file. - view my attachment -
It's interesting that you haven't had much of a problem in creating a bootable USB emergency restore or backup, just as the CD rom version is.
I'm going to try and see if using my IBM Thinkpad comes up with the same result.

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282939-120865.jpg 140.06 KB

Alan,

With grub4dos you can do either a single boot USB drive in which the contents of the ISO are written as individual files to the drive which allows the TI app to run off of the flash drive itself or, you can copy the ISO itself to the flash drive and use grub4dos to load the ISO contents into your system RAM and run from there.

Review the link provided in detail again as both methods are outlined and explained there.

Enchantech

I have tried a few times to make my flash drive boot into the Acronis stand alone rescue program.
I set up the flash drive using the Grub4DOS installation guide. So far, no luck - the computer for some reason doesn't see
the flash drive and boots up into Win 7 as normal. I made sure that the 1st boot device in the BIOS was the removable flash drive.
I've included a MSword document that has some jpg images for you to look that might give you a clearer picture of what
my process was.

Thanks, Alan

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283233-120874.doc 178.5 KB

Have you ever been able to successfully boot your computer with any other utilities from a flash drive?
Is your USB flash drive a Sandisk drive?

When I boot my computers from a USB drive, I press one of the f keys at the BIOS/UEFI splash screen to load the boot menu and then select my USB drive from the list.

I'm attaching a zip file that contains the standalone version of the HP USB Format utility. I have only ever had issues booting one USB flash drive and formatting it with this utility resolved the issue. Reformat your USB drive with this utility and then try the grub4dos steps again.

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283278-120880.zip 38.5 KB

Alan,

You should edit the Menu list to appear as follows

title Acronis True Image Home 2013
map (hd0,0)/acronis.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)
boot

If you get a file not contiguous error add the following line below the title line in the menu list

map --mem (hd0,0)/acronis.iso (hd32)

You can try Joey's solution as well. The HP utility is pretty much bullet proof in creating a bootable flash drive.

To: Joey & Enchantech
The latest news is that I started from scratch and formatted a different USB stick by Lexar using the HP USB format utility Joey attached.
I Completed the Grub4Dos procedure and again tried to boot using my Windows 7 desktop computer, it still didn't work.
In Joey's comment ' I press one of the f keys at the BIOS/UEFI splash screen to load the boot menu ' got me thinking that he is booting up on a notebook computer since that is the norm for notebooks. So I tried booting up on my Lenovo Thinkpad using the F12 boot menu and Wah-lah it worked!

So, looks like I'm set.

I really appreciate the input and help you both have given me. It's one of those things that it wasn't a do-or-die situation but as a real challenge that I wanted to see through.

Again Thanks - Alan

That's good to hear. Glad you got it working.