Bootable recovery disk fails to see any drives
Having paid for the upgrade to Acronis True Image Hom 2012 I am not impressed that the bootable recovery disk fails to see any of my hard drives! This is not a good start. I have a bog-standard, literally off-the-shelf ACER PC with a SATA hard drive inside it, and it is, to me quite staggering that a product with the standing of Aronis can release a Linux boot disk in to the public domain that fails to work in such a serious and catastrophic way.
Having said all this, what are the solutions offered in the knowledge base?
"Try Bart PE"...Err does not appear to be compatible with Windows 7. Sorry, are you seriously recommending another product because you can't be bothered to fix your own? There are quite a few SATA drives out there you know?!!!!!!!!!
"Try Win PE" - you need the Plus Pack to get it working. The Plus Back needs a new serial number. I have to PAY for it? You must be joking...?
OK, how to download the Plus Pack? No indications ANYWHERE of where to obtain the Plus Pack which I apparently have to pay for?
So what next? Search me? I work in computer support full time, and I am completely stumped. I shouldn't have to WORK this hard to get a product to work that I have paid for.
I have to agree with the OP... I have Windows 7 64 and a very standard Asus system. I run the ATIH 12 "burn bootable media" and it produces a CD that cannot see any of the drives (all eSata) in my system. Since the ATIH was running on the system when it made the CD, it should have been intelligent enough to determine that the media it was producing would be able to do the job it has to be able to do. Anything less than that means you are producing and selling a useless product! Why can you not understand that? Making backups that cannot be restored is USELESS! Making us jump through all of these hoops to find a PE (whatever that is, it looks complicated) Your developers should have done all of that for us and put it in the "Burn Bootable Media" utility. I am now stuck fumbling around trying to figure all of this out. By the way, remember Acronis 11? (not 2011) It produces a CD that CAN see all of the drives on my system and CAN do a backup and restore. So what have you done wrong with the super duper upgraded 2012 version that makes it not be able to do what a 5 year old release can do?
Argh!
So that you know Dennis, I am not an Acronis employee, just a user like you.
Why Acronis produces software that creates bootable CD that lose compatibility, I don't know.
Regardless, you need a working bootable CD to use Acronis TI, and you cannot use an older version to restore backups created with a new version.
That's why you and I are left with the options described above.
Creating a WinPE-based disk is not super simple, but is very doable. You just need to follow the instructions in the help file carefully.
Other backup products are included a WinPE builder by default in their products.
Hi Pat,
Thanks so much for chipping in and I do welcome your support. However, I must say I remained concerned: In that I should not really have to buy the Plus Pack to get a bootable CD to work - I shouldn't have to pay Acronis extra to resolve something that is promised by, and absolutely fundamental to, their advertised product. This to me is about the competence of the company providing the software.
Regarding your other suggestion of trying to download the latest bootable ISO file from Acronis, I started to do this, but was put off by a clearly labelled statement from Acronis that there is "No Difference" between the Iso generated by the programme and the one downloadable from the site. They are, as stated here on this site, EXACTLY the same...If that is really the case, then why download it, if you see what I mean.
I will, of course consider sending my system report to the helpdesk, but that feels like more work that I have got to do, and I actually need to get on with trying to get my system stable again, and capable of restoring reliably from backup again (it was a partly a failed restore by a previous Acronis product that got me in to this mess in the first place!).
I wonder how long Acronis will be able to sit on this one before they actually have to do something about it?
I don't know Paul, we have been asking for the WinPE for several of the past annual versions. The Acronis support personnel do often suggest that a new CD be made via the download and the reason being that often times a different burn procedure or program is used to hopefully achieve a different result--if the burn quality was an issue. Now that Windows 7 has its own ISO burn program that may no longer be true but I find the ImgBurn to be quite good for a free ISO burn program.
If this is indeed a problem with the Linux CD not having the right drivers, I have read posts in the past about Acronis being very good to help people with a CD which will work for their system. And, their manual says as much. i do not know, however, if they charge for this service if you are beyond your 30 days.
A lot of folks are talking about a "Linux CD" - none of us are using Linux... it is Windows and most particular Windows 7 that does not work... arguably the most popular O.S. in use today. In my case if I do happen to have a working hard disk, just one that is out of date... Acronis 12 will do a restore properly. Lets say you have been backing up every day at 1 AM and you have your main hard disk for the "C" drive in a removable tray... like I do. You can take last weeks hardrive, put it in, load 12 and tell it to recover. It finds the backups on the NAS drive just fine and all the eSata drives. It doesn't pop up saying "Cannot read from sector "0" on drive 1" and crash like the Bootable media CD does. Who know why it is doing that. If you put in a bootable CD made from Acronis 11 (not 20011) it loads and can see the NAS backup storage and all the eSata drive as well. It cannot recognize and use the backups made from Acronis 12 of course but it DOES recognize the hardware environment. This CD from 11 was made on this same system. So obviously Acronis has made an error in producing bootable media CD's for Acronis 2012. The shipping product is broken.
Seems like a lot of people are having problems like I am am. Acronis tells you to go learn become a software engineer to fix this problem. Makes you think they do not have any working for them...
A lot of folks are talking about a "Linux CD" - none of us are using Linux...
They mean the Acronis True Image Home Recovery Media bootable CD (or USB). That recovery environment is based on Linux, so some things operate a little differently from Windows, such as enumerating of drives.
But even so, if the Linux CD worked in ATIH v11 you'd think it'd work in v12 on the same hardware. But yeah, this is one for contacting Acronis directly - if you can find a way of doing so, I mean, if you're outside your 30 days and don't feel like paying for support.
Well... it just keeps going! I took an hour and followed all of the complex instructions to get the Windows AKI package downloaded and burnt to DVD, then installed the Plus pack and made up the WinPe boot system recommended in the manual. Well it seems this is some sort of cmd.com DOS box based utility that can load a version of Acronis 12 low level Backup and restore utility. I kind of works in that it does see all of the drives/media... but it is very slow and has poor failure capabilities. I tried to restore, it ran for about 45 minute then crashed saying "Operation failed!" in big red letters. No explanation at all of what had happened! Was it a read error? Was it a write error? What do I do now? Tried it a second time with the same results.
I then ran the "Validate Backup" utility and it passed.... So, was it a disk write error since the backup is intact?
Just for grins I decided to try and boot the hard disk anyway, even though the restore had failed after 45 minutes. Guess what? It worked!
Then I loaded the installed Acronis 12 software off of the restore running in Win 7 64 bit, and made it do a third restore using the original Acronis 12... took about 55 minutes but it completed this time with no errors!
So there was no problem with the backup on the NAS drive, no problem with the destination hard drive but the 2 hours to build the WinPE exercise produced a poorly functioning utility that has slim failure capabilities.
What a mess!
Hello everyone,
Thank you for your posts and your help everyone, we really appreciate your feedback.
Paul and Dennis, we are very sorry that you have experienced these issues and we are sorry for the inconvenience.
I will forward your feedback to our Product Management team and you can always submit your feedback from this link.
Unfortunately it is not possible to add support for all existing hardware to our bootable media. If there is an issue with hardware detection, we offer to investigate the issue through our Support team or create WinPe bootable media.
Please note, that we do not charge for support if there is a recovery situation and we refund the support fee if the problems turns out to be a known one.
You can always contact our Support team directly with this diagnostic information.
We are open to your ideas and you can contact our Management team at managers@acronis.com
Thank you.