Failure to restore BOOTMGR ?
Hi folk, I've got a Windows7Pro 64bit system with a RAID0 and RAID1 volumes. I'm using Acronis 10. I run a nightly backup of the RAID0 volume ( which is my boot volume ) to a vault on the RAID1 volume. This is incremental, but with a monthly full backup.
Recently, a Windows Update damaged my system, for reasons unknown. Basically it seems that it trashed BOOTMGR on the RAID0, such that the system would no longer boot. It may have done other damage too, but that's speculative. I'd love to understand more about how that could happen, but that's not the purpose of my query here.
I attempted to recover my system by restoring from backup. I booted using a previously prepared Acronis boot CD, found my backups on the RAID1 volume. The RAID0 volume was also found and appeared intact, but since I did not know what damage had been done I performed a restore including boot sector. Everything appeared to work.
However, I did not get my BOOTMGR back. Eventually I had to resort to a repair using the Windows 7 install media. That succeeded in bringing my system back.
Here is the question. I was expecting this to be unnecessary - have I misunderstood what a 'Backup' in Acronis terms is actually backing up ( or is capable of restoring ) ?
Hi Chris,
Windows Disk Manager does not show a 100M system reserved partition on the RAID0 ( boot ) volume. It shows a single partition which is described as 'System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump, Primary Partition'. The reported volume size corresponds with the expected disk capacity. Disk Manager does show a 100M 'System Reserved' partition on the RAID1 volume. There is no folder, hidden or otherwise, called 'system'.
Both my incremental and full backup tasks are 'disk' backups, if that's what you mean by 'disk image' ?
I have *not* used the boot CD to store an image of the RAID0 volume on the RAID1 volume, if that's what you mean ?
I do use the boot CD to clone the RAID1 volume to an external SATA device periodically as my secondary backup plan.
OK, I'm starting to get a clue :)
On the RAID1 volume, in the System Reserved partition, there is a bootmgr with a creation timestamp corresponding to the time I installed Windows, and a BCD.log with a timestamp that could plausibly be the last time the system successfully rebooted before it went AWOL.
So it appears asif all this time I may have been booting from this 'D:' partition, though I still don't understand how this would happen.
Now, on my C: drive, I have a bootmgr created at roughly the time I was solving my problem, and likewise a Boot directory and BCD.log with datestamps that indicate they are the current ones.
So for reasons currently unclear, it appears that my system ( the BIOS and/or MBR must be involved here ) suddenly decided that it should look at C: for it's boot files, rather than D:. Not finding them, it just failed.
Of course, Acronis could not resolve this problem as I was restoring a disk that, in all likelyhood, had never contained the files that the boot process was now seeking !
Which doesn't really answer the question 'what went wrong', but at least explains why Acronis didn't fix it. Of course it would be nice if Acronis *was* smart enough to fix it, or at least notice a potential probem and point out that you were backing up a disk with an OS on it that wasn't actually bootable in it's own right.
Interesting idea.
Which drive/partition is marked as active?
My thinking is that there might be some way off TI checking for the active flag.