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HELP: Recovery Stalls When Adding External Hard Drive!

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I have a Toshiba laptop and I thankfully did a backup of the main drive.

The Acronis recovery files are all there and are visible on an external hard drive.

I have the Bootable CD and when I boot up it is stable all the way through to the main screen on the laptop.

But if I ad the external hard drive with the recovery files to the laptop, it goes thru the Boot disc boot up and then as soon as it hits the main Acronis screen it stops shuts down and starts over.

If I don't add the external drive the Acronis disc goes all the way through without stopping. I then can't add the files because the external drive shuts everything down.

What to do?

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Hi Max,
Try building a new bootable CD. This time specify the following boot media start up parameter:

pci=nobios

Test again with the the USB device connected before boot.

Post your progress.

If you crash again an Acronis System Report may give us visibility into your issue.

This behavior can have more than one cause. Laptop chipset, BIOS issue, chipset used in external drive, driver used on bootable media, etc.

Thanks Shadowsports I think I did this correctly and put the line into the Command Line Area on the new bootable CD.

But it goes to a black screen and shuts down after loading.

Hmm, not sure if you are hanging and timing out or crashing. I'd say system report next. Sort of a catch all, but does provide insight to your environment. Might be tricky in your case. See if you can generate the report with the drive connected, before you chose to start acronis. If not, you'll have to generate with it disconnected and post what you have.

What about trying this..

I remove the laptop drive set it up as a slave to another Desktop PC and copy the Acronis backup files thru the external drive to the laptop drive.

Would this work?

It seems it's just a matter of getting the files from the external drive to the laptop drive, this is one way to do it?

Max,

I remove the laptop drive set it up as a slave to another Desktop PC and copy the Acronis backup files thru the external drive to the laptop drive. Would this work?

Maybe yes, maybe no. It would not hurt to try but the preference is for the target disk to be inside the computer in its normal boot position.

Did you try
Use the TI CD and boot into the TrueImage program without the external attached.
Have the external powered up but not attached.

After TrueImage is started and at its menu, then attach the usb cable from external.

Wait a minute or two for the drive to be recognized and then attempt a recovery and see if the external is recognized.

OK tried the hook-up thru another PC and that din't work the desktop couldn't see the laptop drive.

So back to square 1.

Tried this scenario with same result - used TI CD without drive and the full menu is on show - add the external drive a minute later and reboot to blank screen.

OK so maybe add the TI files on the external drive as newly burned CDs?

More info about the External disk, please. Is this a 3 TB size disk, etc?

Is this version 2012, build 7119?

Thanks Grover yes I should have started there!

The external drive is Seagate 1.5TB and this is Acronis 2010. It's worked flawlessly for me so far (clone process).

I am now trying a different ext hard drive and I'm migrating the files over..more later!

Max,
I am running out of ideas. Open Windows Disk Management console with the Seagate attached and see if "basic" is the type disk assigned to this disk.

OK tried the new ext drive and it got me all the way through to the 'next' tab on the Menu and then it crashed but I could see the file on the ext HD I just can't load it.

Instead of putting the command suggested by Shadowsports into the build, try using a standard build, boot the PC from that and when the Acronis Loading.... text appears, press the F8 button on your laptop, this should get you to a shell panel that has the word quiet... showing, remove the 'quiet' and enter the suggested command then press enter. This will then give you a normal Linux looking boot screen and you'll be able to see if the Linux kernel 'panics' anywhere during the boot, if it does note what it is complaining about and it might give some indication of a driver problem or hardware clash.

Note for others following this thread, normally the 'quiet' wouldn't be removed you just add the command onto the end but then you wouldn't get to see the boot screen information which in most cases is just fine.

Tried this and nothing showed. I think this hard drive must be near dead. I've done the Acronis Add Drive link and it's now showing as 'unallocated'.

I think I need to take steps to now start over with this drive and reformat. Any tips received with considerable thanks!

if the drive is unallocated, the next step would be simply to do a restore of a backup
using which restore method is applicable from this link
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618

Probably the disk option restore is the most applicable--assuming that your backup is all inclusive of everything on the disk.

I think it's all there Grover - I can see all the files and the 'architecture' of the set up. It was a full back up and it appears to have been successful.

Worst case is I salvage what is on the backup and simply do a complete rebuild of basic Vista.

Onto the restore option - more later! Thanks for being there!