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Recovery from image built in a Win7 installation without 100 MB system reserved partiton

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I have been using ATIH in an installation of Win7 Prof x64 without the 100 MB system reserved partiton.
Since ATIH 2011, 2012 and now 2013, I experienced increasing problems with recovery. Using the latest build of ATIH 2012, ATIH would not even start from the recovery CD, the same now with ATIH 2013. Acronis support told me that with my hardware setup the problems could not be solved.

I now found that the problems relate to the missing 100 MB partiton. After setting up a new installation of Win7 including the 100MB partiton, the recovery CD will work again.

But now I am unable to recover the boot partition from an old image to the boot partiton of the new installation of Win7 (which sits on a SSD). I was able, though, to recover the boot partition from an old image to an empty hdd running ATIH 2013 from the new installation of Win7 (it would not work from recovery CD). I can create a backup image of this recovered partition but this backup also cannot be recovered to the boot partiton of the new installation of Win7, which has the 100 MB partition.

Is there any way of recovering the boot partiton from an image that was created under Win7 without the 100 MB system reserved partition to the boot partition of a Win7 installation including this 100 MB partition? Or do I have to reinstall all my programs to the new system?

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This is not a typical problem for ati. I suspect there perhaps was a problem with the OS installation that was corrected with you reinstalled but that didn't fix whatever wonk went into the backup. What I think is most likely your problem is that, when isntalled without a reserved partition, then the "main" partition is marked as the active or booting partition as it contains the boot manager. However, when installed with the 100, the reserved partition is so marked because it contains the boot manager. So prob could be having the right partition marked as the active partition or trying to restore an active to non-active or vice versa.

If that was the case, then if you tried to restore to an empty hard disk, you would have no prob and the result would boot.

JoLo,

"Is there any way of recovering the boot partiton from an image that was created under Win7 without the 100 MB system reserved partition to the boot partition of a Win7 installation including this 100 MB partition? Or do I have to reinstall all my programs to the new system?"

You should be able to restore the bootable Windows 7 OS partition backup to the system drive with the 100MB System Reserved partition on it, but the system may not boot at first. Be sure you do not restore the MBR /track 0 information from the backup. You would then need to boot to your Windows 7 System Repair Disk (you did create one in Windows 7, right?), or your Windows 7 installation media, and perform a Startup Repair. This should correct your boot issue. If this fails there are several command line tools that can be run from the two disks mentioned, that allow the boot issues to be repaired manually.

Be sure you have a good backup of the current install that you can restore before attempting this.

James

Thanks for the tips,

but I am not able to recover to the new boot partition. These are the results of my tests (I use Disk Director 11 to set partitions active or not active):

The boot partition in the old image is set to active by definition. I created an extra image of this boot partiton when set to not active.

1. From recovery CD:
a) both image boot partition and new Win7 boot partition are not active.

Shown under volume size:
leading free space: 8.589.934.592 TB
volume size: 0 Byte
trailing free space: 149 GB (which is the size of the partition containing the image)

Selecting new destination:
New boot partition (and system reserved 100 MB partition and other partitions ) ist greyed out, not selectable.

b) image boot partition is active, new Win7 boot partition is not active.

Shown under volume size:
leading free space: not specified
volume size: not specified
trailing free space: not specified

Selecting new destination:
New boot partition (and system reserved 100 MB partition and other partitions ) ist greyed out, not selectable.

c) both image boot partition and new Win7 boot partition are active.
like b)

d) image boot partition is not active, new Win7 boot partition is active.
like a)

2. Running ATIH from new Win7 installation:

Destination boot partition is not active by definition.

Image boot partition active as well as image boot partition not active:

Selecting recovery destination: New boot partition (and system reserved 100 MB partition and other
partitions ) is shown in red.
Selecting it says not enough space. Image boot partition size = 72,8 GB compressed, 111,8 GB
incompressed, new boot partion space = 111,7 GB. The difference of 100 MB equals the size of the system
reserved partition in the new Win7 installation.

So I shrunk the image boot partition to 85 GB and created an image with this partition active and one
image with this partition not active. Results:

3. From recovery CD:
a) both image boot partition and new Win7 boot partition are not active.

Shown under volume size:
leading free space: 8.589.934.592 TB
volume size: 0 Byte
trailing free space: 149 GB (which is the size of the partition containing the image)

Selecting new destination:
New boot partition can be selected, recovery fails, though.

b) image boot partition is active, new Win7 boot partition is not active.
Like 3a)

c) both image boot partition and new Win7 boot partition are active.
like 3a)

d) image boot partition is not active, new Win7 boot partition is active.
like 3a)

4. Running ATIH from new Win7 installation:

Destination boot partition is not active by definition.

Image boot partition active as well as image boot partition not active:

Selecting recovery destination: New boot partition is selectable.
But recovery crashes when booting in the process of recovery.

So the size of the image boot partition being greater then that of the destination boot partition seems to have been one issue.

But for the rest: Any suggestions?

Be sure to restore from the Rescue Media, not within Windows.

The problem you are seeing is related to this:

"Shown under volume size:
leading free space: 8.589.934.592 TB
volume size: 0 Byte
trailing free space: 149 GB (which is the size of the partition containing the image)"

This problem has been discussed on this forum, but no resolution to it exists that I know of. If you have a partion that you are trying to restore and get the "leading free space: 8.589.934.592 TB" message, you will not be able to restore it at all on any drive.

Since you are using 2013, and this is a recovery issue, you should open a case with Acronis support and obtain help with this issue. You may be able to provide Acronis with some additional information about the "leading free space: 8.589.934.592 TB" error and hopefully it can be tracked down and corrected. Please contact support here: http://www.acronis.com/support/contact-us.html

Today I installed a bigger SSD. Recovery of the boot partition from the same image that caused all the trouble, to the unpartitioned new SSD worked without any problem.

JoLo,

I said:

"Shown under volume size:
leading free space: 8.589.934.592 TB
volume size: 0 Byte
trailing free space: 149 GB (which is the size of the partition containing the image)"

This problem has been discussed on this forum, but no resolution to it exists that I know of. If you have a partion that you are trying to restore and get the "leading free space: 8.589.934.592 TB" message, you will not be able to restore it at all on any drive."

Apparently I was wrong in my statement (based on other's experiences, not my own). (You did use the same backup as the one that gave you the above error, right?)

James