Booting from USB works only ONCE
I have encountered a problem booting Acronis from a USB stick. I had two full-disk backups of my computer (lets call them A and B) and needed to restore the computer from backup A and then restore it from backup B (to verify behaviour of a software package before and after installing an add-on component). The backups are stored on an external USB-connected hard drive. I did the following:
1. Created a bootable Acronis media on a USB stick (successfully)
2. Booted the computer from the USB stick and recovered it from the backup A using full disk recovery of all partitions (successfully)
3. Verified behaviour of my software in "state A"
4. Attempted to boot the computer from the USB stick to perform recovery from backup B. The computer would not boot from the USB stick and continued to boot into Windows. The boot order in BIOS showed USB stick being listed first; I could see the computer briefly accessing the USB stick during the boot process so it is aware of it, but it would not boot from it.
5. Re-created a bootable Acronis media on the same USB stick (successfully), but booting still would not happen
6. Created a bootable Acronis media on a different USB stick (successfully)
7. Booted the computer from the second USB stick and recovered it from the backup B using full disk recovery of all partitions (successfully)
8. Attempted to boot the computer from the second USB stick. Now the computer would not boot from either the first or the second USB sticks. As before, the boot order is correct and the USB sticks are briefly accessed during the boot, but the computer boots into Windows.
I would appreciate any suggestions how to resolve this issue. While I accomplished what I needed to do, it appears that I am left in a situation where a USB stick can only be used to boot Acronis once per recovery operation, and then it becomes unusable for the purpose of booting Acronis – a situation that is not sustainable long-term.
I am running Acronis Home 2013 Build: 5551, Sync agent version: 16,0,0,6671. Computer is Asus UX21A, i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, Windows 7 Home, fully patched. I can provide the log files of two recovery operations if necessary (although all they seem to show is a sequence of successful steps).
Regards,
Michael
As a test, completely power down your system, unplug it, and press the power button to discharge the system, insert one of the USB Flash drives that will not boot the system, and power the system back up and try again. If successful, it may be how your BIOS is initializing the USB port and/or Flash drive when used more than once. Also try using a different USB port for testing.
Hi James,
Thank you very much for your help. You guess was almost right on the money. Powering down the computer did not solve the issue, but disabling the existing entry for the USB in the boot order and then enabling it again did the trick. It appears that BIOS somehow retained the status of the USB boot entry and it did not match the actual drive. When I used Esc to get the boot choice screen during the boot, I saw two entries with identical names "UEFI USB Kingston" - one of them did not do anything (I assume it was the earlier record), and another successfully booted Acronis from the USB stick.
It is a strange behaviour, but at least I know what is causing it and how to deal with it.
Thanks,
Michael
You may want to see if there is a UEFI/BIOS update for your system, as this would definitely be a problem that should have been corrected in a firmware update if documented and reported by end users.