Help using Acronis True Image 2012 WD edition

Try to put your disk in the disk tray, but do not close the tray. Then launch the bootable media wizard again. The program should close the tray itself and that may solve your issue.

Pat L wrote:

Try to put your disk in the disk tray, but do not close the tray. Then launch the bootable media wizard again. The program should close the tray itself and that may solve your issue.

I don't have a disc tray. I have a disc slot- on the side of my computer. So, there's no closing it, the disc is either in it or it's not. My Computer is a Dell Studio 1555 laptop.

Try leaving the CD out and let the program ask for it.

If that does not work, see if your create version has the option to create an iso file instead of the CD. If yes, then create the iso file and then burn the iso onto the CD as disk image. if using Windows 7, try the open with option and choose the burn to Windows disk player. If using XP, you may have to download a free program such as ImgBurn to create the burn as image option..

Burning the ISO to a CD worked. But after I boot with it and try to clone my C: drive to my 3TB L:\ WD external 3TB external drive, it won't let me. Both drives are grayed out and unselectable when I get to point where I set a destination drive.

Have you contacted WD support. The support for your product should come from them (although we don't mind trying to help here). I would think that the supplied version of TI from WD should have no problem recognizing your new WD 3TB disk. The original drive should be grayed out when selecting a destination as it is the source disk, but you should be able to see and use your new disk for the destination. With the paid version of Acronis 2012, GPT partitioning is supported allowing you to use the entire 3TB as a single partition without any additional software to "make" your system see the drive correctly. The software you are using is a limited version of the ATIH paid version and as such does not have the same features.
Some clarification is needed to be able to help you. What is your operating system, and how is the 3TB drive connected to your system, did you install the WD version of the software on your current Windows installation, and what are you trying to do (backup to the new 3TB drive from within Windows using the WD Acronis software, create a backup image of your old drive to your new drive, or clone your old drive to a the new one?). Here is a link to the user manual for you. Be sure to read the section pertaining to drives larger to 2TB. http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/atiwduserguide_14192/ATIH2010WD_u…

James F wrote:

Have you contacted WD support. The support for your product should come from them (although we don't mind trying to help here). I would think that the supplied version of TI from WD should have no problem recognizing your new WD 3TB disk. The original drive should be grayed out when selecting a destination as it is the source disk, but you should be able to see and use your new disk for the destination. With the paid version of Acronis 2012, GPT partitioning is supported allowing you to use the entire 3TB as a single partition without any additional software to "make" your system see the drive correctly. The software you are using is a limited version of the ATIH paid version and as such does not have the same features.
Some clarification is needed to be able to help you. What is your operating system, and how is the 3TB drive connected to your system, did you install the WD version of the software on your current Windows installation, and what are you trying to do (backup to the new 3TB drive from within Windows using the WD Acronis software, create a backup image of your old drive to your new drive, or clone your old drive to a the new one?). Here is a link to the user manual for you. Be sure to read the section pertaining to drives larger to 2TB. http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/atiwduserguide_14192/ATIH2010WD_u…

Have you contacted WD support. The support for your product should come from them (although we don't mind trying to help here).

Yes, I have. They said they don't provide support for OEM version of true image like the WD edition, and referred me here.

but you should be able to see and use your new disk for the destination. With the paid version of Acronis 2012, GPT partitioning is supported allowing you to use the entire 3TB as a single partition without any additional software to "make" your system see the drive correctly. The software you are using is a limited version of the ATIH paid version and as such does not have the same features.

I was looking for a free edition. I've also tried EaseUS Todo backup and had a similar problem. Although my 3TB drive was not greyed out when I tried to clone it, it told me it was unsupported- that I couldn't clone my C:\drive to it. I was booting from the ISO on a disc with that as well.

Some clarification is needed to be able to help you. What is your operating system, and how is the 3TB drive connected to your system, did you install the WD version of the software on your current Windows installation, and what are you trying to do (backup to the new 3TB drive from within Windows using the WD Acronis software, create a backup image of your old drive to your new drive, or clone your old drive to a the new one?).

I'm using Windows XP professional SP3. The 3TB hard drive is onnected via a USB hub to my laptop. Yes, I did install the WD edition software on my computer (Windows professional- it's the only OS I have installed) And I'm trying to clone my 300GB C:\ drive to my external 3TB USB Hard Drive.

No, I'm not doing it from within windows. I created and burned the ISO file to a disc and am booting with that, trying to do it from the disc, I'm told you can't properly do it from within Windows (the hard drive that windows is installed on in my case) it would be like working on an engine that it is still running, which makes me wonder why it even lets you attempt doing so. Yes, I am trying to clone my C: drive to the L drive.

Here is a link to the user manual for you. Be sure to read the section pertaining to drives larger to 2TB. http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/atiwduserguide_14192/ATIH2010WD_u…

Ok, I'll read it.

Is your goal to make a backup image of your original disk for restore/recovery purposes, or to actually clone your old drive to the new one and put it in place of your original drive?

Who did you talk to about support for the Western Digital version of Acronis. The answer you posted here sounds like you talked to Acronis and were told they do not support OEM versions such as the one from Western Digital your have. It is the responsiblility of Western Digital to support the OEM version they included with your drive.

James F wrote:

Is your goal to make a backup image of your original disk for restore/recovery purposes, or to actually clone your old drive to the new one and put it in place of your original drive?

Yes, I have to send my computer away for repair. I want to make a backup (clone) of my C:\ drive for backup purposes. Also, thereafter I do plan to wipe my C:\ drive, reinstall windows and use PC mover to selectively move things from the cloned image to my new C:\ drive thereafter (after I wipe it clean and reinstall windows) They've said this can be done if I mount the cloned image.

James F wrote:

Who did you talk to about support for the Western Digital version of Acronis. The answer you posted here sounds like you talked to Acronis and were told they do not support OEM versions such as the one from Western Digital your have. It is the responsiblility of Western Digital to support the OEM version they included with your drive.

I talked to Acronis here, in an online chat. WD didn't include it with my external hard drive. I downloaded True Image 2012 WD edition for my own use about a week ago- I just wish I could actually use it. I want to get this done.

okay, lets start with some terminology clarification. Cloning a drive is a process that makes an exact copy of one hard drive to another. It does not make an image of the drive, it makes a copy of the drive. When you do a disk based backup using Acronis True Image Home, you are making an image of the hard disk to a file. To be able to "mount" the image you created, you would need to have created a backup of your disk to an image file. Based on what you describe in your posts, it looks like your best bet is to have Acronis True Image Home installed on your XP system, and then create complete disk image to a file on your external hard drive. After you get your system back, and you re-install Windows, you could then install Acronis True Image Home. After it is installed, you then would have the ablility to "Mount" the backup image file located on your external hard drive and use the PC Mover software to attempt to move your programs to your new XP installation, or selectively restore your data files from the image back to your new installation . (I would not recommend using PC Mover. Clean installs of all applications would be much better.) You also could restore your computer to the state it was in before your shipped it off from the image file you created by booting to the recovery CD/DVD and doing a full disk recovery. The problem I see is the bootable CD/DVD that you created is having trouble seeing the 3TB external drive on your system correctly. This would be necessary for any of the options just discussed. If your external hard disk is still not being used yet, you could use the Windows diskpart command line utiility to clean the external drive and start over with the drive being blank, then let Windows XP partition and format the drive. If you do this, you will not be able to have a single 3TB partition, but will have to split the drive into two partitions. A 2TB and 1 TB or some combination of the two with not larger than a 2TB partition. Windows XP can not support 3TB drive as single partition with a special driver, and this may be part of your problem with the bootable CD/DVD. After that you could then boot to the CD/DVD that you created and try to do a disk backup to the external drive (Not a clone). If you can do a disk based backup to the external drive from the bootable recovery disk, you would also be able to restore/recover your system from it as well. Acronis uses technoloy that allows you to do a full disk based backup while in Windows by taking a snapshot of your system before the actual backup begins. It is not necessay to do the backup from the CD/DVD, but you should be able to do it using either the CD/DVD or from within Windows. If I am going to restore a drive from a backup image file, I always like to create the image from the bootable recovery media so that I know that I can see all the drives and perform a backup properly. Also a test restore of some files or folders from your image file is a good idea before you ship the system off, to be sure you can recover your system, or restore files, from the backup image. Hope this helps.

James F wrote:

okay, lets start with some terminology clarification. Cloning a drive is a process that makes an exact copy of one hard drive to another. It does not make an image of the drive, it makes a copy of the drive. When you do a disk based backup using Acronis True Image Home, you are making an image of the hard disk to a file. To be able to "mount" the image you created, you would need to have created a backup of your disk to an image file. Based on what you describe in your posts, it looks like your best bet is to have Acronis True Image Home installed on your XP system, and then create complete disk image to a file on your external hard drive. After you get your system back, and you re-install Windows, you could then install Acronis True Image Home. After it is installed, you then would have the ablility to "Mount" the backup image file located on your external hard drive and use the PC Mover software to attempt to move your programs to your new XP installation, or selectively restore your data files from the image back to your new installation . (I would not recommend using PC Mover. Clean installs of all applications would be much better.) You also could restore your computer to the state it was in before your shipped it off from the image file you created by booting to the recovery CD/DVD and doing a full disk recovery. The problem I see is the bootable CD/DVD that you created is having trouble seeing the 3TB external drive on your system correctly. This would be necessary for any of the options just discussed. If your external hard disk is still not being used yet, you could use the Windows diskpart command line utiility to clean the external drive and start over with the drive being blank, then let Windows XP partition and format the drive. If you do this, you will not be able to have a single 3TB partition, but will have to split the drive into two partitions. A 2TB and 1 TB or some combination of the two with not larger than a 2TB partition. Windows XP can not support 3TB drive as single partition with a special driver, and this may be part of your problem with the bootable CD/DVD. After that you could then boot to the CD/DVD that you created and try to do a disk backup to the external drive (Not a clone). If you can do a disk based backup to the external drive from the bootable recovery disk, you would also be able to restore/recover your system from it as well. Acronis uses technoloy that allows you to do a full disk based backup while in Windows by taking a snapshot of your system before the actual backup begins. It is not necessay to do the backup from the CD/DVD, but you should be able to do it using either the CD/DVD or from within Windows. If I am going to restore a drive from a backup image file, I always like to create the image from the bootable recovery media so that I know that I can see all the drives and perform a backup properly. Also a test restore of some files or folders from your image file is a good idea before you ship the system off, to be sure you can recover your system, or restore files, from the backup image. Hope this helps.

okay, lets start with some terminology clarification. Cloning a drive is a process that makes an exact copy of one hard drive to another. It does not make an image of the drive, it makes a copy of the drive. When you do a disk based backup using Acronis True Image Home, you are making an image of the hard disk to a file. To be able to "mount" the image you created, you would need to have created a backup of your disk to an image file. Based on what you describe in your posts, it looks like your best bet is to have Acronis True Image Home installed on your XP system, and then create complete disk image to a file on your external hard drive.

Now that I know the difference, I was able to (at least attempt to) backup my C:\ drive to my external L: drive. Someone else in this forum was saying how slow it is, and it definitely is slow. It literally took all day today to make the backup. It shouldn't take that long with a 300GB drive should it? It certainly wouldn't take that long when I'm transferring something to the drive in windows from another hard drive to. It said it would be done in 3 hours at 2PM, then 3 hours later is said it would be done in 4 hours. I booted with the ISO image on a CD of Acronis TI WD edition.

After coming home about a half hour ago, and seeing my computer off (which I requested in the program- for it to shut my system off after it had finished) I'm not even sure if it created the image file correctly. During the time it was doing so, I could the hear the fan screaming like it usually does (overheating is the reason I'm sending it to get fixed to Dell) and although it shutting down may indicate that it completed the backup, It may not have, because my system has been known to shut down when it overheats. The file created on my L external hard drive in 200GB, which about 248GB's of my 300GB C: drive are occupied. Unless it's compressed or something, my computer may have shut down due to overheating.

Also, there were two partitions on my C drive the normal one I would expect 250 or so Gigabytes and another on, a small FAT16 one. I chose the backup both of them, it looks like it put them in the same file.

After it is installed, you then would have the ablility to "Mount" the backup image file located on your external hard drive and use the PC Mover software to attempt to move your programs to your new XP installation, or selectively restore your data files from the image back to your new installation . (I would not recommend using PC Mover. Clean installs of all applications would be much better.)

I know I could install everything one program at a time back to my system, it's just a hassle, especially installing each individual program from discs. But, I've used PC mover/migration software to move all software from an old computer to a new one and never had a problem.

You also could restore your computer to the state it was in before your shipped it off from the image file you created by booting to the recovery CD/DVD and doing a full disk recovery. The problem I see is the bootable CD/DVD that you created is having trouble seeing the 3TB external drive on your system correctly.

It doesn't appear to be anymore. Though today, unlike before it asked me to attach a WD drive when I booted from the CD. This was a simple matter of power cycling my power strip, it then let me past that step.

Also a test restore of some files or folders from your image file is a good idea before you ship the system off, to be sure you can recover your system, or restore files, from the backup image. Hope this helps.

I thought of that myself actually. What about say deleting a start menu program then, doing a full system restore, just to see if it will do it correctly? I do want it to restore everything like it was when I made the backup, and want to test this rather than just an individual start menu program. This is what a full system restore would do anyway, isn't it? Restore everything to the way it was when I made the backup- thus it would restore the one program I removed, correct?

Backup speed while booted to the recovery media seems to take longer than the same backup done from within Windows. Your backup time depends on many factors, but data size, amount of compression, and data transfer rate between the source and target drive, are the items that have the most bearing on this. If you are backing up to an external USB drive, your are more than likey limited by the USB bus max transfer rate. When in Windows, disk write caching can be enabled on the external drive, and that helps some, but ultimately backup time is dependent on the items just discussed, with a few more varibles that can come into play.
You are correct, the backup image file is compressed by default, and depending on how compressible your data is the backup image file (.tib) is normally is about 60 to 75% of the original size, but can be smaller or larger than those numbers as well.
The backup, if done in disk mode, would contain all the partitions (as well as the Master Boot Record and Disk Signature) of your drive in one image file.

As far as the test restore, you are a right, a full restore test would be the ultimate test, but if there is a problem being able to restore, and you selected to your whole drive and it wiped the drive before beginning and then could not complete the restore, you would not have the opportunity to try a different strategy. The main things to test are: Being able to boot to the rescue disk, while booted into the rescue disk, being able to see both the souce and target disk, locating and validating your backup file, and doing a test restore of a few files/folders. When in the bootable recovery media, when you select restore/my disk and select the backup file located on your external drive, you should be able to see the partitions that were backed up from your source drive. As fas as whether or not your system completed the backup will only be known if your can validate your backup.
If you have ATIH installed in Windows, you can vaildate from there, but you may also want to try and validate from the recovery media as well, to be sure the vaildation is successful in the recovery environment you will use.

James F wrote:

Backup speed while booted to the recovery media seems to take longer than the same backup done from within Windows. Your backup time depends on many factors, but data size, amount of compression, and data transfer rate between the source and target drive, are the items that have the most bearing on this. If you are backing up to an external USB drive, your are more than likey limited by the USB bus max transfer rate. When in Windows, disk write caching can be enabled on the external drive, and that helps some, but ultimately backup time is dependent on the items just discussed, with a few more varibles that can come into play.
You are correct, the backup image file is compressed by default, and depending on how compressible your data is the backup image file (.tib) is normally is about 60 to 75% of the original size, but can be smaller or larger than those numbers as well.
The backup, if done in disk mode, would contain all the partitions (as well as the Master Boot Record and Disk Signature) of your drive in one image file.

As far as the test restore, you are a right, a full restore test would be the ultimate test, but if there is a problem being able to restore, and you selected to your whole drive and it wiped the drive before beginning and then could not complete the restore, you would not have the opportunity to try a different strategy. The main things to test are: Being able to boot to the rescue disk, while booted into the rescue disk, being able to see both the souce and target disk, locating and validating your backup file, and doing a test restore of a few files/folders. When in the bootable recovery media, when you select restore/my disk and select the backup file located on your external drive, you should be able to see the partitions that were backed up from your source drive. As fas as whether or not your system completed the backup will only be known if your can validate your backup.
If you have ATIH installed in Windows, you can vaildate from there, but you may also want to try and validate from the recovery media as well, to be sure the vaildation is successful in the recovery environment you will use.

Backup speed while booted to the recovery media seems to take longer than the same backup done from within Windows.

Not for me, at least. I tried doing a backup from within windows last night and stopped it, because it told it would take a ridiculously long time to do, 36 hours in fact.

Your backup time depends on many factors, but data size, amount of compression, and data transfer rate between the source and target drive, are the items that have the most bearing on this. If you are backing up to an external USB drive, your are more than likey limited by the USB bus max transfer rate. When in Windows, disk write caching can be enabled on the external drive, and that helps some, but ultimately backup time is dependent on the items just discussed, with a few more varibles that can come into play.

It was very slow yes. but I'm just glad it's (probably) finished now, assuming it didn't shut down due to heat instead. I'm pretty sure it did complete the backup correctly. I didn't think of it, but I shouldn't have clicked the box to have the system shutdown automatically after making the backup. Because I did, I have no way to know whether it completed the backup or whether it just plain shut down before it was finished.

The backup, if done in disk mode, would contain all the partitions (as well as the Master Boot Record and Disk Signature) of your drive in one image file.

Ok, I just want to make sure it puts them back in the right order. I'm not sure what that small partition is for. But, I haven't done anything partitionwise ever-since I got this system 3 years ago, I haven't messed with the partitions at all. I've left it totally the way it came to me. I just hope it puts it back the right way. That my system will be the same as it was when I made the backup after I restore it, I don't know how that small partition will effect it.

When in the bootable recovery media, when you select restore/my disk and select the backup file located on your external drive, you should be able to see the partitions that were backed up from your source drive. As fas as whether or not your system completed the backup will only be known if your can validate your backup.

Yes, I can see them actually, within the file, I can see both partitions. How can I validate my backup exactly? What do I need to do to validate it? Seems like it's pretty good news what you were saying about it being compressed. At least I know it's possible it backed it up correctly, and that it didn't automatically fail/shut down due to heat because it is not the exact same size as my C:\ hard drive is (248GB's full, 300GB's total)

Doing a hard drive recovery from the bootable media using a disk based backup will restore your disk as it was when you backed it up.
The partitions will be in the same order. The small partition you have is probably a manufacturer created utilility partition.

Since I don't have the version of Acronis you are using, according to the manual:

Page 79 Section 14.2 http://support.wdc.com/download/notes/atiwduserguide_14192/ATIH2010WD_u…

1. To validate an archive, click Recovery on the sidebar.
2. Select the archive to validate and click Validate on the toolbar.
3. Clicking Proceed will start the validation procedure. After the validation is complete, you will see the results window. You can cancel validation by clicking Cancel.

You may need to "Browse for Backup" to locate your backup file to validate it, if it is not in the list.

I guess I should validate it after booting from the disc ISO as well. Because it tells me it will take 36 hours to do that as well, from within Windows. After I validate it, what I want to try to do is uninstall a start menu program and try to restore it using Acronis.

So, it isn't really guaranteed that you would be able to restore a whole hard drive from a backup? That you can't rely Acronis to do it correctly? Doesn't sound good in the event of a hard drive failure. Are most programs like this?

If you validate a backup file,whether in Windows, or using the bootable media, the time estimated will vary as the validation takes place. The 36 hours estimate is not accurate. You would have to let it run and finish to know how long it would take to complete. Since you are going to be using the bootable rescue media to do your hard disk restore/recovery upon return of your system, you would want to validate from the rescue media to be sure it validates in that environment.
If you can boot to the rescue media and perform a validation and a test restore of a few files, you should feel comfortable that you would be able to perform a full disk recovery. Any backup software program should be tested on a particular system to prove that restore/recovery works on that system, to have confidence in it. No backup software vendor can make an absolute guarantee that recovery/restore will be successful. If you never perform a test restore before you need to use recovery/restore in an emergency, you would be in a bad situation if you could not do it. That being said, Acronis has been making backup software for many years. They have thousands of customers that have performed recovery/restore procedures such as this with great success. If you are concerned about one software package not meeting your needs, you could use more than one program to make backup images, and then you would have additional means to recover your system. I have used Acronis True Image home products version's 7,8,9,10,11,2009,2010,2012,and am now beta testing 2013 and have performed successful hard disk recovery/restores too many times to count, using every version. No one product is perfect, and some computers just don't get along with some software packages due to many reasons. You should find one that works for you and purchase it so that you have support from the software vendor.

Ok, so I have now validated the backup, it was and completed successfully. And, I have successfully restored a file and folder I deleted as a test.

Only things are

1. It has trouble recognizing my WD USB hard drive, even when it's plugged directly into the computer via USB, and of course-powered. Power cycling fixes this, but I have to do it every time I boot from the disc, it doesn't recognize it even when it was attached before I turned on my computer.

2. When I selected recovery method>chosen files and folders, it asked me whether I would like to restore the files to a new or the original location. I couldn't choose original location, it was grayed out. Any idea why?

Can you only use this feature when you select whole disks and partitions? They wouldn't have been there anyway, because I deleted the folder and file in order to do my test. I'm guessing this feature is only for when you want to copy an entire hard drive over the one you already have, replacing the new files/folders on your disk with whatever ones you have in the backup,

Sean C

1. It is always a good idea to attach the external drive to your system after booting up into the recovery environment. This helps because the Linux based recovery disk will assign drive letters to all the connected drives at startup. If connected after Acronis recovery environment is started, you get more consistent results with the drive letter assignments. Acronis even suggests that this is the preferred method when using the bootable media (per previous knowledge base article). I do this and it works well. It takes a few seconds or so to recognize the drive after being attached to be ready to use. What ever method you use to allow you to see the drive while in the recovery environment is fine.

2. I can't answer your question about why you couldn't restore to your original location, maybe a limitation in the WD OEM software version you are running. (?) If you successfully restored to an alternate location, at least you have proven that you can restore to your drive.

The steps you have performed should give you some confidence in the ability of the software to be able to do a disk recovery/restore at this point.
Unfortunately many folks don't even try the steps you have to test the recovery/restore before needed. A little time up front can save a lot of frustration in the future. Good luck with your plans going forward.

Defining 'original location' under bootable media is hard. Let's assume it was e:\somefile under live OS. Under bootable media mapping of drive letters is different (e.g. C:\ will be assigned to reserved partition on windows 7). It's possible to read volumes/letter assignment from OS's registry, but what it there was more than one OS on the source system, with different letter mapping?