Trial version - got BOOTMGR IS MISSING - Managed to fix but confused why Acronis did htis?
I am trying out Acronis TI Home 2011.
I did a full encrypted backup of all my drives using the compression method (*not* sector by sector)
Anyway, my drives and partitions are like this
SATA Port 2
- C: (Vista boot) and D:
SATA Port 1
- E: and F:
IDE Port
- G: and H: DVD ROMS
SATA Port 0
- I:
When I decided to test out recovering *just* E: the Acronis recovery manager had all the drives in a different order (basically the reverse order)
Anyway - I chose E: and it said it was going to move it to D:
I went ahead and it all seemed fine but when rebooting I got BOOTMGR IS MISSING
After a lot of faffing about reading the kb articles (the fixboot options from the Vista recovery console failed to work). I checked in the Acronis recovery boot disc again and found that Acronis had set F: to be an active partition alongside C: - so I had TWO active partitions.
I am not sure why Acronis decided to do this - all I asked it to do was restore E: to E: (which in the boot recovery console it saw as D:)
I managed to then fix everything by using Diskpart in the Vista recovery console to set F: to inactive.
But this seems like a pretty crazy thing to have to do after a restore???
Am I missing something here???
The thing is, I do have unique names for each partition. I was able to match the volume names up (and the size). So this part made sense to me.
What confused me was that on that volume, where there were two non-active, primary partitions, Acronis decided to mark one of them active. This is wrong as the proper, active OS drive is a different partition on a different volume.
This did not make sense at all. All I asked the recovery manager to do was restore disk E: to Disk D: (which I knew was really my Disk E: based on the name of the volume).
It did that *and* it marked the other partition in that volume (of two partitions), which is disk F: (which it was calling disk E:) as active. When I booted back into the recovery manager and went as far as selecting which disk I wanted to restore to, I suddenly saw (after much grief) two green stars against two partitions. C: and F: (or as Acronis saw it, E:)
So that totally confused me?
Is this a bug?
Yes, the user must correct any wrong assumptions made by the software. De-selecting an active partitions is sometimes one of those choices.
The best backup to have is a disk backup. This is a backup where you checkmark the disk as to what is to be included in the backup and that disk checkmark will cause all partitions (both hidden and diagnostic/recovery) to be included in the backup. By checkmarking the disk as the backup option, this will also cause the "disk signature" to be included in the backup.
When restoring, you can use the backup to restore or create an entirely new disk or restore single or multiple partitions. If restoring a single partition, the program should have just restored that partition with the same characteristics. However, I have seen times when the user had to override the choices made by the software.
Perform a new disk option backup and then simulate another restore. It is practice until you reach the final summary screen where you can either Cancel or Proceed. Do NOT click the PROCEED button unless you really want the Restore to begin. Once you click the Proceed button, you are committed and it is too late to cancel.