Restored drive boots Dell Diagnostics partition and not Windows Vista partition
I have just restored an Acronis backup using the Recovery CD after the hard disc on my Dell laptop failed.
I have installed a new hard disc and ran the restore - just going with all the default options. There were multiple partitions to restore (I am not sure what they all do) so I just ticked the option to restore all of them. The restore completed successfully but when I rebooted, the system booted into the Dell Diagnostics partition rather than the Windows Vista Partition. I could not find anyway of changing this. Arrgh.
I have tried to run the restore again (after deleting the partitions) but cannot see an option which allows me to specify which partition will be the partition which will be the boot partition. Very annoying.
Also, Acronis insists on mapping the Windows partition on the backup which is Drive C to Drive E (and there does not appear to be an option for changing this)
At the moment, I am running the restore again, selecting the option to restore the MBR and just the Windows partition but I am not confident that this will work so any suggestions for how to get Acronis to set the correct partition as the boot partition would be very useful.
Feeling very frustrated as I would have expected the default options to have restored the disc in a working state.
Details
- Windows Vista
- Acronis True Image 2010
- Restoring from a USB drive
Thank you
Richard

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Thank you for your reply. This is almost exactly what I did - specifically Steps 4 and 5 are exactly what I did - which seemed to cause all my problems. The only steps that are different is that I didn't use the Add Disk function after installing my blank/unformatted disc.
I can't see is anything in your reply which makes me think that I would get a different result this time - can you identify what I need to do specifically ensure that Acronis makes the Windows partition the one that the machine boots from rather than the diagnostic partition.
Or to put it another way, what determines the partition that Acronis sets as the bootable partition?
Thanks
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When performing a disk option restore (all partitions restored), TI Home will normally make the same disk active as before. If restoring single or multiple partitions, then it is up to the user to make sure that the correct partition is marked as active.
If you perform a disk option restore and the proper partition is not marked as active, there are several way for the user to simply to correct the selection. Looking at your original disk inside Windows Disk Management will show which is the active partition.
One easy program to change the active partitions is the free Partition Wizard.
http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html
To use, be sure and unselect the wrong partition and reselect the correct partition and apply changes.
Several of the Vista systems I have seen has the active partition assigned to the main largest Vista partition. You should also be able restore the vista partiton only and assign it as the active partition IF that is what you need to do.
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Is the new drive the same size as the old one?
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GroverH wrote:When performing a disk option restore (all partitions restored), TI Home will normally make the same disk active as before. If restoring single or multiple partitions, then it is up to the user to make sure that the correct partition is marked as active.
But that's my question - how do I tell TI Home to make the Windows partition active?
GroverH wrote:If you perform a disk option restore and the proper partition is not marked as active, there are several way for the user to simply to correct the selection. Looking at your original disk inside Windows Disk Management will show which is the active partition.
.
But I couldn't get Windows to boot - on booting, it always started the diagnostic partition
GroverH wrote:One easy program to change the active partitions is the free Partition Wizard.
http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html
To use, be sure and unselect the wrong partition and reselect the correct partition and apply changes.>
I had a quick look at this previously and couldn't work out whether I could get it to boot off a CD
GroverH wrote:Several of the Vista systems I have seen has the active partition assigned to the main largest Vista partition. You should also be able restore the vista partiton only and assign it as the active partition IF that is what you need to do.
This is what I ended up doing - just restoring the Windows partition ONLY and the MBR but for future reference it would be useful to know how to tell TI which partition to make active.
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Colin B wrote:Is the new drive the same size as the old one?
No - does this make a difference?
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Richard Collings wrote:Colin B wrote:Is the new drive the same size as the old one?
No - does this make a difference?
It can do, with W7 the booting file (BCD database) knows where the actual NTLoader is. Depending on how that entry appears in the BCD the Windows boot files may be on a different part of the disk on the new drive - the BCD looks in the old place which now has a different set of files.
However, this does depend on how the entry appears in the BCD and normally isn't a problem.
Did you let Windows resize the drive appropriately or did it restore to the old size?
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Richard,
In answer to some of your questions in post #5.
In order to have control over which partition is active, the user must choose to restore the partitions as individuals rather than as a disk option restore. All the partitions are restored and resized before pressing the proceed button. MBR and Disk Signature is restored afterwards in a separate pass.
The Partition Wizard CD program is as bootable CD. It is a fully self-contained bootable CD.
If using a Disk Option restore (all partitions) with no user resizeing:
If you used the version 2010-7046 inside Windows to perform the restore, then all your patitions were expanded. This would also be true of the 2010-7046 ISO file.
If you used the version 2010-7046 bootable CD created from within the program, your disk restore should have keep the partitons all the same size with the extra space being unallocated.
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I have had this happen to me when restoring a single partition also. The first few times it happened to me I did not even thing of looking to see if the correct partition is active since my previous version of TI did not exhibit this behavior (me thinks) but after few times of attempting to restore this I realized what the problem was. Using bootable USB to load to DOS and executed a MBR utility I have to correct this problem. There are many ways to do this using different programs that will work outside of the Windows environment - since Windows will not boot.
The problem as I see it that many people will not know what to do and will assume that the backup image is bad or that the TI does not work.
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Thanks for your reply, Grover
GroverH wrote:In order to have control over which partition is active, the user must choose to restore the partitions as individuals rather than as a disk option restore. All the partitions are restored and resized before pressing the proceed button. MBR and Disk Signature is restored afterwards in a separate pass.
I think this is very poor behaviour on the part of Acronis - why can't it just restore all the partitions in a single step and make partition that was active at the time of backup, active in the restored set of partitions - I would think that 99.99% of users when restoring a disc would want this. As a subseqent posted indicated most people will think that the restore has not worked correctly. And why did it choose to make the diagnostic partition the boot partition. All very puzzling and extremely annoying. I am surprised that there have not been a lot more complaints.
And how can I be sure that when I restore the other parititions, it will not make one of these the bootable partition (in which case I am back to the same problem again)
GroverH wrote:The Partition Wizard CD program is as bootable CD. It is a fully self-contained bootable CD.
Why should I have to buy/use another programe to fix a problem that Acronis should have got right in the first place? And why doesn't the Acronis recovery disc provide a tool which allows you make these adjustments.
Feeling very unhappy with Acronis at the moment
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Richard,
I am not here to answer for Acronis. My responses was merely to provide you some possible solutions which may help you to recover as quickly as possible. Remember, the forum is most about volunteers helping with postings. If you want official support, then you must create a support ticket.
And how can I be sure that when I restore the other parititions, it will not make one of these the bootable partition (in which case I am back to the same problem again
When restoring individual partitons, the user has control over which partitons are marked as active-primary-logical, etc.
One of the nice things about TrueImage is that you can practice doing all of these procedures and it is practice up the point where you reach the Summary screen and must choose either the Cancel or Proceed button. Click Cancel when practicing and if you click the proceed button, you are executing the optons previously selected in that session.
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Apologies for my grumpy reply - appreciate that you are doing this as a volunteer (and thank you for your help) but I am very disappointed/annoyed with Acronis and True Image. What I want (and I woudl suggest most other users also want ) is something that will backup a complete disk with all its partitions and then let me restore an exact image of that disc that works in exactly the same way in the unfortunate event that I have to replace the original disc. And for it do this by default and in a straight forward way.
It is very stressful to lose a disc in this way and you want the restore process to be as quick and as straight forward as possible.
I have a technical background but no up to date knowledge of PC and I spent an extra couple of hours (at least) researching the problem and then trying to sort the problem out.
I am going to contact Technical Support to try and get answer to this and will post back with the outcome.
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I have asked for the EXACT SAME THING. Apparently, disk imaging is not a clear-cut straightforward procedure. Though the programmers and marketing guys would make you think otherwise.
I myself want a simple and effective way to image the drive into one file. The mbr, the partition tables, everything, all partitions. EVERYTHING! And I want to be able to restore EVERYTHING in one operation. I do not want to mess around with anything else. Just a simple image.
No one here can tell me that a complete drive is imaged in ati2011, it isn't! Plain and simple.
Richard, I have gone 'round and 'round with a problem similar to this situation. I am working on a mission-critical Dell machine, and now I've taken on several more systems. I am looking for a consistent and easy way to image the drive. Apparently the imaging in TrueImage (and many other drive imaging programs) do not take a complete image of your drive. Not in the way the average consumer would expect. Folks need to be aware of this. And because you are not aware of this behavior, you went ahead and thought you made a full copy of your hard disk. You did not.
Todays drive imagers, as I understand it, image the "C" partition, then they grab part of the MBR. Now, when you go to restore, they write the "C" partition back, and that is good. They also restore "part" of the MBR. Not the whole thing, just the front part. The back part, if you will cut me some slack, the partition table, only has descriptors pasted back into it. There COULD be other data that is NOT captured or saved. Your partition table could be relative or absolute. There could be some custom code, and the partition descriptors might not be 'supported' by ati2011.
When ati2011 goes to restore, it doesn't write EVERYTHING back. In fact, I was told it was by design, that everything is not captured and written back, under the guise of that it could cause problems with future restores and other partitions. Well now, that is possible, but it doesn't have to be that way. If a partition is going to overwrite something, then you should be given 3 warning screens.
In this case you have here, not saving and restoring the MBR and partition table in its entirety *IS* causing you a problem.
For what it's worth, I had a Gateway machine in which I "thought" I imaged. And when I went to restore, same deal happened. Well to me that is **NOT** an image of the whole disk. Because if it was it would be restored exactly. I had to reorder the partitions in order for them to work.
What we need is an answer from Acronis on the exact and precise behavior. Actually we shouldn't even have to have an answer. This problem should have been 'fixed' long ago! The program should do exactly what it implies it does. It does not.
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Anybody have any further information on how to easily make acronis ti 2011 easily and correctly restore dell machines??
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Thanks for your helpful reply, Keatah. It is reassuring to know that I am not alone in thinking that there a significant gap beween what is promised 'on the tin' and what actually happens in practice. I would be happy to be told that I have got this wrong but the continuing silence from Acronis on this is very annoying
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Any comments from acronis on this?? Or would it be correct to come to the conclusion that Ati2011 does not and cannot image a disk correctly? I have a decision to make in the days ahead and would like a clear-cut answer.
Best of regards to all!
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I would also like to see the answer to this. I have now spent the better part of a week trying to restore a Dell laptop. There are several posts on how to do the Dell restore on the forum. I have not yet found one where the OP said that the proposed solution actually worked.
I'm going to call Acronis support for help. Woops, no phone number, you must buy support. Okay, I'll pay for it, I can't waste another five days. Woops, can't even see how to do that. Hmmmmmm.
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Dennis,
Are you logged into you account when you click on the support tab?
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Yes.
I thought I was before, but there is a possibility that I was not.
I just verified that I am logged in and I finally found the place to purchase support.
Thank you for the tip. I really shouldn't be this difficult.
P.S. I'm now up to 30 hours trying to get the restore to work, and I THINK I made a breakthrough. Will be sure within an hour or so more of work, but it is looking positive. What a nightmare.
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