Recovery Disc (USB) does not boot on Sony Vaio S

srmans,
Apparently the 2012 boot disk, whether CD or USB, created from within 2012 build 7133, does not support your graphics card. Take a look at this post as it is related. http://forum.acronis.com/forum/33546?page=1#comment-104462 (especially the posts near the end concerning using F11 on the selection menu to set the VGA mode before starting ATIH). Support may be able to supply you with an ISO that may work.

Thanks. I shall wait and see what arrives in the forum from technical support.
Meanwhile I will try the F11 suggestion tonight.
Cheers, Stephen.

I have been directed to this forum by James F because I apparently am having the same poblem under discussion here. I have a new Sony VIAO 'S' series laptop running Windows 7 x64 and have been trying so simulate a boot after a hard drive failure to test if the Recovery Disk I made from my Acronis TIH 2012 program will work in that situation. My BIOS boot priority has been set to place the internal optical drive at the top. I place my Recovery Disk in the optical drive while booted up and then shut down. Then I turn on power and the computer appears to boot from the optical drive and produces a screen like this:

Starting Acronis UEFI loader
1. Acronis True Image Home
c. continue booting

I press 1 and I get a lengthy error message exactly as described in the above posts indicating that the output graphic mode was not detected, whatever that implies. I chatted with Acronis tech support and they first told me to press F11 when that error message appears and enter 'vga=ask', then at the # sign enter '/bin/product'. However, no opportunity to make any entry appears. Instead it goes first to the manufacturer's start-up logo (VAIO), then back to the same screen it started at (above). The only way to proceed from there is to remove the Recovery Disk and press 'c', whereupon it goes into a normal Windows boot up. I am in the process of trying to use a download from Acronis tech support to burn a new Recovery Disk that they think may overcome the problem. I will report on progress here in this forum.

I downloaded a file from Acronis that the tech support person thought would overcome the problem described in my previous post and allow my computer to boot into the Acronis recovery environment. However, the same thing happened as before and I got stopped by the error message saying that it had failed to detect the graphic output mode. The next step I guess is to go back to Acronis tech support and see if they have any other ideas. Right now I have another matter to attend to so will be silent for some hours.

This appears to be a problem on the 2013 beta recovery disk as well.

Hello Everyone,

Thank you for your posts.

Please see first this article from our Knowledge Base, that may be helpful for boot issues with graphic problems.

As it is difficult to troubleshoot boot issues in general, the best way is to contact Acronis Support in order to get this solved. Find more Information about here.

Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Thank you.

Edited: removed invalid link.

Peter,
Thank you for your reply, but I can not open your link. Access Denied.

Hello James,

Thank you for your reply.

You are right. I have to apologize for this. So far, I can only suggest to contact Acronis Support as mentioned in my first comment.

Please let me know if you have additional questions.

Thank you.

The comment from Peter Vigoureau is almost the same as I received from chatting with Acronis tech support, which has not helped since there is no opportunity to enter 'vga=ask'. It differs in one respect, which is to change the BIOS graphic level from 1 Mb to 8 Mb before booting. I am going to try that now.

I can see no way to change the BIOS video level selection from 1 Mb to 8 Mb as advised in the procedure that Peter Vigoureax posted. I am unfamiliar with BIOS and perhaps someone who is familiar with it could find how to do it.

I also have a new Sony Vaio S-series (SVS model) and encountered the same error

ERROR: "Run time exception; Failed to detect graphic output mode; code 21495812"

To Harold and anyone else experiencing this problem, here is a solution:

Booting directly from the boot disk made from Acronis True Image Home 2012 caused me to get the error.
Booting from an .iso image that was obtained from Acronis support caused me to get the same error.

The problem is that the error occurs during the boot up of the recovery disk, before you are given any options as to using Acronis, or generating a report.

SOLUTION: I solved the problem by using a free program called YUMI (in Google, search yumi multiboot), which creates boot-up images on a flash drive. I used YUMI to place the Acronis .iso image on the flash drive. I then rebooted my computer, YUMI showed the boot-up options, one of which is the Acronis .iso. I selected the ISO and I was able to run Acronis in recovery mode!!

So, the problem you are having with the error "Failed to detect graphic output mode" on new Sony Vaio laptops is in the boot-up loader, not in the Acronis recovery program.

I hope this helps as I was going crazy with this problem myself.

mhodgin,
Thank you for your feedback.

I received another e-mail from Acronis Customer Central instructing me to activate Acronis Recovery Manager in my 2012 ATIH and then try again to boot from the Recovery disk in the optical drive. It had no effect and made no difference. The same error message appeared and pressing F11 did not provide an opportunity to enter 'vga=ask' and select the graphic output mode. The support technician said that they were able to make this work but I pointed out that there must be differences between the computers they are testing this on and the Sony VAIO 'S' series we are discussing in this forum.

Just for the record, it occurred to me that the dedcated graphics card in the Sony 'S' series computers might be involved in this problem, especially since the error message refers to a failure to detect the graphic output mode. With that thought, I tried using the slide switch on my computer labeled 'STAMINA <>SPEED' to see if it made a difference. From information in the users guide it is my understanding that this switch selects either the dedicated graphics card for video processing (SPEED) or the Intel video circuit that is integrated onto the motherboard (STAMINA). However, it made no difference.

Hello Everyone,

Thanks for your replies and assistance.

I missed a way to workaround your issue, that might solve your issue.

You can use BartPE Plug-in to boot your machine. How to work with it, you will find in this article from our Knowledge Base. Please remember, that the hardware drivers, you add to BartPe are used to boot this windows boot media and should be always 32 bit and unpacked. Using this Plug-in, you will be able to add all the windows drivers you need in order to boot your machine for restore operations.

I will add this post also in the Support Case of Harald.

If there is anything else, we can do for you, please let me know.

Thank you.

With regard to the most recent post by Peter Vigoureux, I note in the knowledge base article he refers to that "BartPE does not support Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and 64 bit systems." Since the Sony 'S' series machines run on Windows 7 x64, the BartPE Plug-in would not seem usable in this case.

I had a choice recently of purchasing a well-featured VAIO S-series at a good price or continue using Acronis TrueImage. The VAIO is being delivered tomorrow.

I knew I couldn't run ATI 10 or ATI 11 under W7, nor even ati2010. ati2011 and ati2012 have been true problematic although I have had each running for quite a while on test machines. I think Acronis needs to make an assortment of ISOs available on its website so that folks with driver issues have a better chance of finding a workable iso with having to go through the drudgery of Tech Support or jumping through hoops.

So, that meant, on a new machine I'd have to find a different solution for backup/imaging.

the vga=ask suggestion is a red herring because the problem occurs earlier in the code, before the loader begins loading. You can force the vga=ask parameter when you build the bootcd but it won't matter, the error discussed occurs before the parameter is called. ati2012 is unusable on the sony S-series new models.

I Just got my SOny Vaio S series and it was giving the same error message about the graphics card while booting Acronis 12 home.

Solution is you have to into the BIOS by pressing F2 at the boot up and go to boot options select the display tab where it gives 2 options AHC something and Legacy.

Select Legacy and then run the Acronis bootable media Flash or CD.
After finishing creating or backing up image go back to the BIos and change it back to Achi.

This worked for me

Faru,
Thank you for your feedback. This problem is under investigation. Can you provide more accurate information about "AHC something"? Also have you tried to restore using the boot disk when your system is configured as you have described?

Just to say I have the same issue with my Vaio S. Seems to be universal. If Acronis don't sort this out, looks like i may be switching to another backup software.

Norman,
Can you do as Faru suggested and post what you see in the BIOS setup for the "display tab" he is looking at? I am curious about the options he sees, but he was not clear on what he changed. Thanks.

AHC sounds like AHCI --options are usually native and legacy, depending on the bios. I'm not at machine so can't check now but will take a look later.
wouldn't have thought ahci would efffect the grpahics.

Scott,
I agree with your post, just trying to find out what was changed. I think that it may have been AHCI also, but am of the same mindset that it would have not had any effect on the graphics. Sony has not done a good job of documenting the new firmware it is using. Do you now have a Sony?

On my new S-Series (model SVS15113FXS) machine, at least, the BIOS options under Boot are UEFI or Legacy.

UEFI = Unified Extensible Firmware Interface

This makes more sense. AHCI is Advanced Host Controller Interface, a technical standard defined by Intel that specifies the operation of Serial ATA (SATA) host bus adapters.

AHCI is controlled in a part of the BIOS not accessible to the user. Sony has been restrciting access to some areas of the BIOS for some time now.

James,

The choice in BIOS is between UEFI and Legacy. There is a caution that if it is not set correctly it will not boot into Windows. Not knowing enough about how this works, I wonder if it is set for UEFI for normal booting except in the event of a hard disk failure, so that it will normally boot into Windows, will there be the opportuinity to change the BIOS setting if the hard disk fails, so that the Acronis Recovery Disk can then be used to boot it into Acronis recovery environment?

dupe

Scott,
Thanks for supplying the information from your system. I assumed that Faru's post had some incorrect info in it. I'm not sure all of the S series laptops will allow you to switch between UEFI and Legacy BIOS, but I hope they all would. Other folks here have had problems on systems (Sony and otherwise) with UEFI firmware and the Acronis Recovery Disks when trying to start from the Acronis UEFI enabled menu. Acronis definitely needs to fix the UEFI side of the recovery disks, as well as to inform/educate their tech support folks about UEFI and how the Recovery Disks interact with UEFI firmware. (the F11 approach, as you noted before, does not even pertain to the UEFI side) . I recommended in other posts to temporarily swith to Legacy BIOS for recovery disk operations and back to UEFI for normal operations with some reported success on other systems. Please let us know how this works on yours.

Harold,
Switching to Legacy BIOS from UEFI will make your system not bootable into Windows if you have a GPT disk running under Windows 64 bit (which you probably do). The problem with the Acronis Bootable Recovery Disk is that the UEFI boot screen that you have seen many times will not start the Acronis recovery environment on your Sony. You can safely switch to Legacy BIOS and then boot to the Recovery disk and do backups as well as restores, but you must switch back to UEFI before booting into Windows.

On my Sony 'S' series laptop running Windows 7 x64, when I changed the BIOS boot setting from UEFI to Legacy and then booted from the Acronis Recovery Disk, it did boot to an Acronis recovery screen which lasted a minute or so and then disappeared, leaving the screen blank except for a blinking cursor. I couldn't make entries from the keyboard at the cursor. What comes next?

intentional deletion

Harold,
At this point you could try following the "F11" instructions you were given earlier by support to set the vga=ask mode, select a mode, then enter the commands they suggested to start the recovery program. The problem your are having now still points to a compatiblity problem with your graphics card(s) not being correctly identified or supported on the recovery disk. Be sure to press "F11" as soon as you see the Acronis screen.

James F wrote:

Norman,
Can you do as Faru suggested and post what you see in the BIOS setup for the "display tab" he is looking at? I am curious about the options he sees, but he was not clear on what he changed. Thanks.

Just to confirm what Scott has said. The choices are UEFI and Legacy. ATIH is supposed to support UEFI because the menu Harold mentioned appears.

It should be UEFI.

I got messed up with some other settings sorry.

Just a thought. Some of these Sony's with the Icores, including mine, use the intel cpu's internal graphics as well as an graphics card (e.g., nvidia). And the presence of two graphic processors might be part of the problem with ati being able to address the the cpu.

Here is the graphics processor info -- no personal info just the basic system info for the display -- the IRQ doesn't look right to me, but I'm no expert on this:

Name Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000
PNP Device ID PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0166&SUBSYS_909C104D&REV_09\3&11583659&1&10
Adapter Type Intel(R) HD Graphics Family, Intel Corporation compatible
Adapter Description Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000
Adapter RAM (2,080,374,784) bytes
Installed Drivers igdumd64.dll,igd10umd64.dll,igd10umd64.dll,igdumd32,igd10umd32,igd10umd32
Driver Version 8.15.10.2712
INF File oem14.inf (iIVBM0 section)
Color Planes Not Available
Color Table Entries Not Available
Resolution Not Available
Bits/Pixel Not Available
Memory Address 0xB9000000-0xB93FFFFF
Memory Address 0xC0000000-0xCFFFFFFF
I/O Port 0x00007000-0x0000703F
IRQ Channel IRQ 4294967294
I/O Port 0x000003B0-0x000003BB
I/O Port 0x000003C0-0x000003DF
Memory Address 0xA0000-0xBFFFF
Driver c:\windows\system32\drivers\igdkmd64.sys (8.15.10.2712, 14.07 MB (14,748,416 bytes), 4/4/2012 10:04 PM)

Name NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M LE
PNP Device ID PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0FD3&SUBSYS_909C104D&REV_A1\4&D935688&0&0008
Adapter Type GeForce GT 640M LE, NVIDIA compatible
Adapter Description NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M LE
Adapter RAM 1.00 GB (1,073,741,824 bytes)
Installed Drivers nvd3dumx.dll,nvwgf2umx.dll,nvwgf2umx.dll,nvd3dum,nvwgf2um,nvwgf2um
Driver Version 8.17.12.9618
INF File oem16.inf (Section007 section)
Color Planes Not Available
Color Table Entries 4294967296
Resolution 1920 x 1080 x 60 hertz
Bits/Pixel 32
Memory Address 0xB8000000-0xB8FFFFFF
Memory Address 0xA0000000-0xAFFFFFFF
Memory Address 0xB0000000-0xB1FFFFFF
I/O Port 0x00006F80-0x00006FFF
IRQ Channel IRQ 16
Driver c:\windows\system32\drivers\nvlddmkm.sys (8.17.12.9618, 13.67 MB (14,333,248 bytes), 4/27/2012 11:19 PM)

Scott,
I believe that there is either no support for the dual graphics setup used on these Sony's or the Linux based Recovery Disk just can't determine how to activate just one when starting. Harold Pohl has had great patience with me and my suggestions as well as dealing with the Acronis support folks often incorrect and not helpful suggestions about trying to use "F11" when booted the the Recovery Disk in UEFI mode (some additional training/instruction is needed there). Still looks like the recovery media can't detect the graphics correctly on his system even when booted into Legacy BIOS, but the good news is that the "F11" method previously discussed in these posts and others does in fact work in Legacy BIOS mode. Although the solution for the moment is a workaround, at least recovery/clone/backups could be made from the bootable media.

Thanks, Harold for your patience and perseverance in this matter. I hope Acronis can address the issue with the Recovery Disk both in the UEFI enabled menu to allow boot options to be changed (similar to "F11" method when in Legacy BIOS mode), as well as provide support for the graphics detection and initialization needed on these new Sony systems so that this cumbersome method (workaround) will not have to be used in the future.

Scott,

Does your 'S' series Sony have a STAMINA <=> SPEED slide switch above the keyboard? I take it that it selects between the Intel graphics on the motherboard and the dedicated Nvidia graphics, or some combination of the two, in some fashion. Do you understand the use of this switch?

I made some errors in the boot procedure I sent to James F. I am correcting them and will post the corrected version.

james, your guess is the same as mine -- although nothing surprises me these days.

Harold, my machine does have the Stamina/Speed choice but I thought this just switched between the Balanced and Performance Power Plans. I thought it was a goofy gimmicky and hadn't bothered yet trying to see what it does. But another user reported toggling that switch to no avail re booting the bootCD.

See post # 72

Thanks, Harold. You taking the time to do this for others is very helpful. Keep in mind the procedure you documented for using the Recovery Disk is useful for backups, cloning ,restores and recovery outside of the Windows environment, and is not just in case the hard disk drive fails. Thanks again for your time and effort to document this procedure.

Ditto that.

Scott,

I think the STAMINA/SPEED slider does have an effect on power because I think it moves Nvidia in and out of video processing and using Nvidia consumes more power. I think it switches the video processing around in some way that is detectable in displayed video. I was watching the British Open using a Hauppauge tuner on my laptop and the signal quality from ABC/ESPN was excellent. I tried both switch positions. There seemed to be a detectable difference in colors and the saturation of colors and I think the resolution was slightly different. Surprisingly to me, I think the STAMINA position had the better resolution, but the SPEED position had the better colors. Not to say that eitther seemed less than excellent to me.

Sounds about right. I'm sure it affects power consumption. I just didn't figure it did anything more than toggle between the two power plans. Nice to know they make it do something diff. It might do more. Iirc, part of the design wisdom of the intel on board graphic processors was to spend less gpu effort on the stuff that doesn't matter as much to most visual gestalts. Now, if they'd only put on a button that serves me coffee ;)

Anyway, based on this page, stamina/speed definiteness switches by gpus (but only if you reboot?):

You might find this page informative.

http://www.sony-asia.com/support/faq/295032/productcategory/it+personal…

The reboot is confirmed here:
http://esupport.sony.com/docs/pc/SVS1311_13A1_1511_series/EN/contents/0…

Scott,

Thanks for those links to info on STAMINA/SPEED.

if i set to stamina before rebooting and then do the bios workaround switching UEFI to Legacy, I can boot up the boot cd without need to specify resolution. The earlier report of stamina setting not helping involved setting the stamina setting but not the using the as yet undiscovered BIOS workaround.

Of course, figuring how to now restore the 4 disk partitions from a gpt disk to a larger gpt is a bit boggling, not mention both disks are advanced format and there's the alignment issue to deal with, but one thing at a time ;)

Just wanted to add my thanks to Harold for detailing the procedure. I haven't tried it yet but am saving it for when I do.

I urge you to try it to make sure the steps play out for you on your machine. Go through a test run right up to but not including the final Proceed.

I had to do a couple of things diff, as noted in prior post. Better to know that know and revise the recorded steps accordingly than deal with it while pressed by the urgency of a need to restore.

Also, when restoring, because it was a GPT dis with 4 basic partitions (come form Sony this way) I had to select and mark the destination for each partition one at a time. If I selected the while disk all at once, then only two of the two of the destination locations were selectable (two were greyed out). GPT is not like doing a standard MBR format restore, but he userguide only discusses GPT restores in the context of dynamic disks, not basic disks.

Norman Fisher wrote:

Just wanted to add my thanks to Harold for detailing the procedure. I haven't tried it yet but am saving it for when I do.

Scott,
It looks like you are attempting to restore to a larger drive in the Sony. Is this what you are trying to do? Did you accomplish this task? I'm not clear about how 2012 handles GPT partitions. Some KB articles contradict each other. Seems to me, that if you create a blank GTP disk, and then restore each partion in the correct order, resizing as needed, than you would be successful, but I don't have a system with UEFI and a GPT disk as a bootable installation. If I understand correctly, UEFI and GPT disks do not require boot code on the drive to be bootable, just the correct GPT partitions in the correct order/location, correct me if I am wrong. I would really like to here about your results, and methods you followed.

Yes, I'm going from 640 gb advanced format 5400rpm to a 750 advanced format 7200 rpm with twice the cache. Unlike MBR restores, with a GPT, it appears you can't select sizes when you restore; you have to do that by creating the target partitions first. If you only have one partitions for the whole hard disk, ati apparently takes care of creating the partition, but otherwise , you have to do it manually first and then manually map from source to target. Nothing in the manual, this is just from trying to go through the steps up to the final Proceed. I've only done the mock up restore with the original disk in place. Who knows, it's mostly guesswork.

Besides the W7 system disk and Hidden Reserved partition, there are two 260MB partitions, which I believe are Sony's. They are laid out thus on original drive:

     Sonysys 260MB

     Hidden Reserved 19.12 GB

     Unamed 260MB

     C: system 676 GB

I suppose if I wanted to go really nuts I could skip the 750 GB spindisk and go right to hybrid ssd/spindisk and really drive myself nuts. ;)

Are you sure the "Hidden Reserved" is GB?

Here is some information I have found on GPT disks. It may be helpful to you and your endeavours.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/gg463525.aspx