Restore attempt: cannot create restore primary partition
Running Acronis True Image 2016, all upgrades, Windows 10 pro. Hard disc #4 formatted to 7 logical drives D thru I, with C drive the primary. Attempting to recover the C drive from a recent backup on another drive. Backup is verified as OK. Proceeding with Recovery Wizard, get to portion "Specify recover settings of Partition C", and under "partion location (required)" am asked for a new location. When I proceed, the space originally occupied by the C drive is now noted as "unallocated." I accept that location and am returned to the previous window. Under "partition type" is the note "primary, mark the partition as active", which is obviously what I want. I choose "next" and select the target disc (which is the original hard disc #4). All partitions are correctly shown for the logical drives on this disc, but the space occupied by the C drive is shown as "unallocated//unsupported", rather than designated as the primary partition. Consequently, the recovery operation fails.
QUESTION: Why isn't that unallocated portion marked as the primary drive and how can I proceed with recovery?
Thanks!!!!! Lee
An update: I found the cause of the issue. Doing a Google search on this revealed that my situation isn't unique, but has occurred with other users.
Basically, what happened is that the drive that originally backed up had some corruption issues in the file structure, but were not revealed. (How the system still functioned OK with those issues is a mystery, though.) So the Acronis software backed up the drive without complaining and it verified it as OK.
When later on I attempted to restore that drive, it failed because of the corruption issues. However, the Acronis software had deleted the files in that drive as the request for restoration was made, so when it couldn't restore, that drive was left empty. In an effort to retrieve those files I attempted a restoration of each file & directory, rather than a whole disk restore. The process completed OK but the drive wasn't bootable. And then doing a chkdsk on that drive revealed MANY errors.
Lesson learned: do a chkdsk command on a drive BEFORE backing up. And it would be nice if the Acronis software would do that or at least issue a warning for the user to do it.
{sigh}
Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately, this is pretty common with bad drives/dirty sectors. I can't begin to count how many times we recommend people check their disks and get grumpy replies back that there's no way the drives are bad. I've even had a few new 850 EVO's with only a few months life go bad on me, so you just never know. Some of the other MVP's have actually recommended having chkdsk features added to the app and the offline bootable media too. Would be nice if it could be added at some point down the road.