Nervous Nelly / Recovery Support
So managed to do something to the hard drive that Windows auto repair can't repair. I have an Acronis b/u from 6 days ago and attempting to recover the entire c: drive. I checked sector by sector and I also checked recover disk signature. I have 1 partition so I sent Disk 1 to what should be the c: drive and Disk 2 to the other partition. Then I started the actual recovery.
Have I done this right?
When completed, will the hard drive be restored to the exact condition it was in 6 days ago?
Hoping,
Nervous Nelly
An unmitigated disaster. No other way to put it. Computer is completely useless now with reinstalling Windows and all the programs. Might as well never have had Acronis.
Bought Acronis in 2014 and have been faithfully making backups and updating the program as insurance against the ONE TIME when something happens. Used to use Ghost with the same protocol and when my hard drive had to be replaced, Ghost dropped an image on the new drive, back in business in a few hours. That is exactly what I expected of Acronis. Instead, 20 minutes for the computer to come back up after the "recovery". Drivers not loading. Error message after error message. All the Office programs no longer function giving me a side by side error message.
So thanks Acronis -- for nothing. And to add insult to injury, I called the Support line before I started the recovery and after speaking to someone, sat on hold for an hour. No one ever came back on to assist.
I'm looking around now for an disk imaging program that I can actually depend on because TrueImage ain't it. I said I was a nervous nelly and my anxiety was unfortunately rewarded.
Ian, sorry to read of the further recovery issues here. If you have tried doing a new install of Windows, then unless your laptop has some very unusual devices, Windows should have installed and worked fine without any issues about device drivers etc.
From your PM that you have now bought a new laptop, it suggests that perhaps the old one was some years old but even so, it should have been recoverable from your Acronis backup image!
Steve,
This goes back to all the original questions about why I kept getting the error message that said I needed Linux because the disks wouldn't lock and then did I need to go sector by sector with Disk signature checked and did I need to have restore both partitions.
I've tried it 3 times now and because I absolutely have to have a lap top, you can't keep doing the same thing over and over with the same bad result. Yes, the machine is a few years old but it was functioning just fine.
Ian, one possible reason for the disk lock issue is if the laptop wasn't shutdown fully and it looks to Acronis as if it is in a hybrid sleep or hibernation type state. Using the Tools > Add new disk option in the rescue media to initialise the disk should resolve that issue and remove any flags indicating a lock being held.
Sector by sector on recovery will be used if needed by ATI so doesn't need to be selected plus is only really of value if the backup image was created using the same method. The disk signature should be recovered to avoid activation issues with installed applications that reference this.
When doing a disk recovery, it is normally best to recover all partitions on the disk by selecting the top disk tick box in the recovery panel, this keeps all the data fully aligned with how the disk was at the time of the backup.
Please see forum topic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document which shows a step-by-step tutorial for doing this type of recovery / restore.
The above focuses on a single disk recovery scenario. If you have more than one physical disk installed, then extra care should be taken to ensure that the correct target disk is selected for recovery. Where possible other disks should be disconnected or removed. Most older laptops only have a single disk drive.
So live blogging this.
Tried the add disk as suggested from above, again got the can't lock disk try Linux.
Made a Linux disk using RMB on a different machine.
Laptop booted into TrueImage and was able to add disk.
Now following instructions to recover from external hard drive, though took awhile to figure out how to select the backup.
Have selected method and recovery point and what to recover.
Acronis is halted on a small window that says Acronis True Image with a little clock turning next to it. I'm assuming -- I hope -- that the program is doing something with the disk and will eventually take me to the destination for disk 1 which is main partition and the destination for disk 2 which is a 2nd partition.
It did after about 10 minutes. The program asked for the destinations. The main partition was obvious. The 2nd partition not as obvious. Suddenly I had a choice between a 21 GB unallocated and an 8 GB which was allocated. In previous attempts, the 8 GB seemed to be the 2nd partition, so that's what I selected for destination of disk 2.
TrueImage began the recovery. No can't lock the disk errors this time. It appears things are going better.
Actual recovery operation taking close to 2 hours now. Previous attempts were only a half hour but all previous attempts failed so for whatever reason, the increased time gives me hope that this recovery is actually working.
NOPE. Failed again. Computer shut off after recovery. I restarted it Windows blue screen came up saying there was a problem, restarted itself and now said repairing disk errors, this might take over an hour.
This is just not right. The image should should drop onto the disk and the machine should work exactly as it did the moment the last back up (Nov 14) was made.
Ian, if you follow the steps shown opic: [How to] recover an entire disk backup - and in particular the attached PDF document, then you shouldn't need to have to select the target for individual partitions. You just select the top Disk 0 (or the number shown) and this automatically selects all the partitions for that disk.
The other key factor for when doing any disk recovery is to boot from the rescue media using the same BIOS mode that the Windows OS uses, i.e. OS and media both boot using UEFI or both using Legacy.
To check what the BIOS mode needs to be, look inside your backup image you are using for the recovery and check what partitions are shown? If you see an EFI System partition this is a UEFI boot system. If you see a Microsoft System Reserved partition, then it is Legacy.
One other point of clarification here: you keep referring to having 2 disk drives - do you actually have 2 separate physical drives installed in the laptop, or are you just referring to drive letters here? Drive letters can apply to disks or partitions and from your latest blog update, it seems to me that you only have a single drive with at least 3 partitions.
Steve,
I appreciate all your help on this but it just isn't working. I had opened a support ticket. I got someone in Acronis tech support chat who basically said the same things you did but without any of the refinements about adding a disk or booting from the same environment. So I tried a 5th recovery and at the end, the computer won't boot at all.
FYI, when I keep saying there are two disk drives, what I mean is that there are two partitions on the C: drive but Acronis keeps asking about the destination of Disk 1 and the destination of Disk 2 which I take to mean the two partitions.
At this point, I have gone ahead an ordered a completely new laptop. It was probably time as the one I'm using is about 9 years old. Still it was functioning fine up until this point.
I have Acronis on my desktop, but now I don't trust it. I won't be installing Acronis on the new laptop. I'll look around for another imaging solution and get rid of Acronis completely. Yes, the computer magazines say it's the gold standard but not for me. The one time I need it, it failed me in spectacular fashion. There's 15 hours of my life I won't get back.
Ian Wilson
Ian, thanks for all your patience here too! If the ATI recovery is actually asking you to select the target for Disk 1 and Disk 2 then this does suggest that it thinks that there were 2 actual disk drives in your laptop, which for a 9 year old model is unusual unless the second drive is a very small cache drive used to try to improve performance?
You will definitely see the difference in going for a new laptop after using the old one! I was using an old Dell Studio laptop of similar vintage up till around July '19 when I treated myself to a new HP Omen (gaming) laptop with an Intel i7 8th gen processor, fast NVMe M.2 SSD and internal Seagate HDD. When I occasionally go back to the old laptop (now used as a 'TV' box in the dining area) I am reminded each time of just how slow that system was, even though it also has an SSD and max 4GB RAM on a 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processor!