How to recover an Acronis Disk backup to a new disk

You are right about where I got confused. No excuse, really, just a brain blank. Your guides are great, and even after I've read them several times I pick up something new with each reading. I'm a former computing professional, and I know how much time and effort writing something like this takes. Many thanks from all, I'm sure.

I know I'm being obsessive about this, but here's a question. I like restoring to my StarTech drive and then rebooting to it to test the restore. Then I know I have a good image sitting on the shelf ready to be called into service quickly if needed. But as you have pointed out, it is inadvisable to restore using the same signature as my C drive. However, if indeed I must put this disk into service because of a C drive crash, the signature is not the same as the crashed disk. So what would be wrong with just updating the disk signature at that time with the diskpart command's Uniquid disk ID = xxxxxxx command. Then I could have my cake and eat it too. Or do I just need to get over this obsession, LOL?

I've been trying to get a chat session with Acronis started all night and have been in the hold queue for hours. I wanted to run the problem with the win 7 restore not working on some disks by them. This does seem to be an Acronis issue, especially since the disks restore in the Rescue bootup. It doesn't look like they are going to answer their chat at all... I'm down to seeing what they have to say and testing another vendor's disk before deciding how I'll change my strategy.

Yes, the expertise is awesome here, James F was terrific! And you've helped me out several times when I was getting started. Your knowledge is amazing. You guys rock!!

If you put a cloned drive in and don't have any program issues, than I would not change it. Once you boot to a hard disk, changing the disk signature "may" create more problems than it fixes, but you "could" change it using diskpart if you wish.

On Symantec's website, here is a bit of info: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH1695…

As far as troubleshooting your new drives, have you looked at Device Manager and compared the settings on the "Polices" tab for each of the external disks, both old and new? For instance - "Enable write caching on the device, and "Turn off Windows write cache buffer flushing on the device", as well as the SATA/IDE/ATA controllers (possibly storage controllers settings) for DMA settings, etc.? You may be able to tweak your system settings to get the new drives working properly.

Thanks for that advice. I will heed it.

James, I'l look at that, something I'm not familiar with. But since the drives work just as drives, and they work on a Rescue restore, wouldn't this indicate the drives themselves are ok?

INFORMATION UPDATE: The Seagate drive came today, and its test was not good. When I mounted the drive, Disk Management told me we had to initialize it, so I did. (Before I initialized it, Acronis couldn't see it in windows 7 at all). Then I went to Acronis Add Disk in windows and executed that. Then executed a restore from Windows. Got "Failure to find operating system information in master boot record". Went back and used Disk Management to allocate it and tried again same error. Went back and booted from Rescue Disk, did an Add disk there, and successfully restored. Then went back and tried to restore from Windows, and the same failure message.

Now I have two vendors' recent disks which will NOT restore from within window. It seems to me something is up at Acronis. I don't think it is my problem since the restores work from the Rescue and not Acronis Windows. What do you think? I've been trying to 'chat' with Acronis for two evenings, but I never get an answer to the chat start...

Many (Most) disks come un-initialized and have to be initialized before use. Additionally they must be partitioned, formatted, and assigned a drive letter(s) to be seen in Windows Explorer.

Initializing a disk in Windows Disk Management, and using the Acronis "Add a new disk tool" perform essentially the same task. Initializing a disk does not create partitions, or assign drive letters, only prepares the disk for use in Windows. In Windows Vista and higher they can be initialized as either MBR or GPT disks.

There is no way for me to be able to ascertain what the issues with your system may be. You say that two disks work okay, and three do not. Are the old disks AF (advanced format drives), are the new ones (most are)? Check the documentation. Being that you have a problem with USB connectivity in Windows with the StarTech dock, there could still be some problem with it in Windows when connected via eSATA that only presents itself with these newer drives. Did you upgrade True image to 2013, or is this the first version of True image installed on your system. If this was an upgrade, have you performed a "repair install" of 2013? Acronis uses a "filter driver" in Windows to communicate with the disk drives. It is possible that this is not working as it should. There are methods to rid your system of older versions of Acronis software, and re-install 2013 that may help. Have you tried a different eSATA cable?

Grasping at straws.........

James, you have gone far beyond the greatest effort to help me, and I appreciate it very much. My 'old' drives are only six months old, and they have the same documentation as the new drives. I don't know about AF, will try to find out. The drives ship without any documentation at all (my Seagate which arrived today didn't even have a packing slip!). It's pretty suspicious that drives from two vendors fail. The WD drives just hang, the Seagate aborts with the MBR operating system information not found message. They are consistent: they always fail in Windows, always with the same log information. And they always work in the Rescue CD bootup.

Obviously it would be Windows that has the problem with the StarTech, not Linux, since the restore works from the boot disk. It seems a long shot, but a new StarTech is on its way to me and should be here in a couple days. I haven't tried a different eSata cable. I think the new unit will ship with one, so I'll give that a try also and report back.

I did a cleanup with the Acronis utility when installing 2013. I had 2012 on my machine, and it went wild when I installed 2013 until I ran the provided utility. So that should be good.

After trying for two days to get a chat started with Acronis (I left it on the screen for hours both days), I just sent in an email with a log. Will let you know what I hear from them. But at this point I am about to give up and just say one cannot restore from Windows and always restore from the CD. That's not awful, but now I would really like to know what the problem is, LOL. I guess curiosity keeps us going. Thanks again ever so much for your expertise and time.

UPDATE: Acronis has contacted me, and I've run a series of tests which I'm waiting for them to analyze. Conclusively my tests show that disks purchased in the past two weeks, Seagate and WD, will not restore from Acronis in windows 7 x 64. The Seagate disks cause a cancel with an MBR message saying the operating system information is not in the MBR. The WD disks just hang and the restore never finishes. My older WD disks, same model and brand, purchased last August work just fine as do two Toshiba disks purchased in the same time frame last year. All restores using any disk work just fine that were created using the Rescue disk.

I changed out my StarTech Dock Drive, but I don't think it had anything to do with this problem. I'm testing the restores by booting up from the StarTech. Today I also tested a restore disk by replacing my C drive with it. It worked just fine without my restoring the disk signature. I saw Acronis notes that you might have to redo your Acronis schedules if you don't change the signature, but I did one scheduled run without a problem and without changing anything. At any rate, if having to redo the Acronis backup tasks is the only price to pay for not changing the signature, I'd say it is a small one.

So in summary I will start creating restore disks using only the Rescue Disk, and I will not restore the disk signature. I'll continue to test a restored disk by booting from it using the StarTech dock drive. If I have a total disk crash, I can pop out the old disk and put in my latest drive restore disk.

I think Acronis has a problem in win 7 x 64 restoring to new disks using ATI 2013. It is curious, and I cannot imagine what the problem is. If I hear anything conclusive, I'll post here. I've done exhaustive testing and generated reports enough for them to see what is going on if indeed they want to get to the bottom of it. If anyone wants to see the tests and reports, email me and provide a way to get them to you, and I'll send them. I have a dropbox if that is helpful. Acronis' instructions for FTPing the reports didn't work, so I'm also waiting for updates on those instructions. Meanwhile, hopefully I'm moving on to something more fun!

Pamela,

Thanks for the updates.

The ftp link(s) Acronis sends out is tricky to use.

Copy (right click and copy) the link, and instead of pasting it in your browser, open Windows Explorer (any folder) and paste the ftp link into the bar that displays the folder name and press "enter". This should open a Windows Explorer window that you can copy and paste your files into. Just close the Window when they are done.

I've tried and tried to get the FTP in IE to work to no avail, but I finally got it working in Filezilla. What I didn't quite understand is the link is to a link, and you copy that second link and strip off the ftp:// from the front of the link and post it into the host name in Filezilla. I'm pretty sure they didn't tell me that, LOL, but the files are uploading now. Will be interesting to see what Acronis says about the rests.

Once you copy the link, you past it in Windows Explorer not IE.