Surface Pro 4 Bootable Disc not recognised
I bought Acronis 17 this morning, set it up on my Surface pro 4 running Windows 10 and backed everything up to my external drive with no problems. I then tried to make a bootable drive but ran into two problems.
I could not get TI to recognise the usb stick. For some reason TI kept telling me that there was not enough room on it although it was a 16Gb stick. I eventually discovered that it had an EFI partition on it. I deleted this with diskpart and managed to get the drive recognised and the files copied. I then tried to test it by going into BIOS on the Surface and changing the order so that it would load from the USB stick. Nothing I tried could get it to work.
Can anybody help me on this? I have used versions of TI going back many years and they all required a bit of messing about to get them going but I am stuck on this one. All the USB drives I have bought recently seem to have an EFI partition on them. Do I have to remove it on them or is it because I gave removed it that the boot operation will not work?
Many Thanks.
Charles
Thank you for your help but as i am still having problems I should very grateful for further assistance.
I installed ADK WinPE10 and ran MVP WinPE Builder. This took me to the stage when ATI wanted to know my intentions. I clicked WinPE. It recognised the USB stick and completed the copying. ADK then restored the original files and completed. I switched the computer off and then re-booted into the BIOS. There was no separate entry for WIinPE but there was one for USB. I changed the boot order and then re-booted but it just booted from the internal hard disk. Nothing I could do would change this.
Eventually, I wondered if it was the USB stick as I had previously removed the EFI partition. I found another one and repeated the whole process. This went very well until the end when an error message came up saying that he application could not load. I decided to ignore this and went ahead with trying to boot from the USB stick. All I managed to get was anothe error message saying that there was a missing file : windows\system32\boot\winload.efi .I think the error code was Oxc0000225. I could not get past this. I suppose it is an advance on the earlier attempt as at least the USB stick was recognised, but I am no nearer getting the program to work.
Could you please help me further on this?
Thank you.
Try doing a full format of the USB drive instead of a quick format and build again. I'm not exactly sure where you're seeing that new error but it sounds like something didn't get written correctly. The MVP tool only prepares the media to allow for 32 or 64 bit builds as acronis supplies the files but only allows 64 bit. We also use dism which is part of the adk to add drivers. Beyond that, Acronis is still building the media when it is launched and it does not format the drive in the process. A quick format won't fix boot issues so try a full format and then try again.
Charles, you can also prepare your USB stick / drive yourself using the following commands run from an Administrator level Command Prompt.
diskpart
list disk (to identify USB drive, i.e. 1)
select disk 1 (set this to the actual USB drive identifed via list disk)
clean
create partition primary
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
exit
Steve,
Worked like a charm. I can now boot into TI and can see the drive where I have my backups. I have not yet plucked up the courage to see if the actual recovery process works and will defer this pleasure until it is forced on me.
I am most grateful to you for the help from both yourself and Bobbo.
Charles
Charles, you are very welcome, glad to be able to help.