Booting from Recovery CD: Error loading Shared Libraries
In my continuing saga to get Acronis 2010 working... I am now convinced that the boot problem is related to the three partitions Dell now creates on new PC boot drives. If I unplug my C: drive the Acronis recovery CD will boot fine. Also, if I boot with a new, unformatted hard disk the recovery CD will boot. This was encouraging because I figured if I actually ever needed to do a bare metal restore it would likely be to a new hard disk. I still cannot figure what Dell is up to with the three partitions. They have the third "recovery" partition marked as Active. Very weird. Apparently the only way to get a PC back to normal would be to reformat and reload the system from scratch when you first unbox it (like we used to do years ago with Dell systems).
Anyway, back to my testing. So it was with great enthusiasm that I setup a test. I did a full backup, installed a new hard disk and booted from the recovery CD. I then chose "Recover" and browsed to my backup image and selected it. I was kind of expected a "Next" screen at that point but I eventually figured out I had to right-click on the selected archive and choose "recover". Upon doing so Acronis immediately crashed and rebooted. UGH!
So much for that idea. I'm almost to the point of being done with playing with Acronis. As a secondary test I used Windows 7 system backup to create an image. I then installed a new hard disk, booted from the Win7 Windows Repair Disk and chose "Restore system from backup image". It worked perfectly! Upon rebooting my system was exactly like the backup and all three partitions were restored. No messing with drive letters or anything. If the standard Win7 backup utility can now create an image and do a bare metal restore it pretty much eliminates the need for Acronis.
Good news!
As you know from reading this thread, Acronis has sent me a dozen different recovery ISO's in an attempt to solve the problem. Yesterday they sent me another one and it worked perfectly. I was able to boot my Dell Precision T1500 from the recovery CD and perform a full backup to an external USB drive. Once complete I installed my space drive, booted from the recovery CD and performed a full bare metal restore. It worked perfectly and I was able to boot from the restored disk.
I assume Acronis will soon be posting an updated recovery ISO which incorporates the fixes.
- John
I also had this problem with newer Dell PCs (Optiplex 780). The latest ISO would not load, but I eventually got it going. What I had to do was delete all of the partitions on the drive that were included by Dell. By default, it has the Dell utility partition, the Windows 7 boot partition, and the main Windows 7 partition. Once they were all deleted the ISO would load perfectly.
I would like to see this fix in the next version of the ISO so that I don't have to manually delete partitions when I want to load the boot CD (2010).
In light of Acronis True Image Home 2011 just being release, are we still going to see the official release of the Dell/Win7 three-partition fix for Acronis 2010?