TI 2013 & Win8 restore not working
OK my SSD went south and when I attempt to boot the boot sector cannot be found but I was not overly concerned because TI 2013 had been running and prior to 2013 I had been running 2012 and had performed several restores using 2012.
On my laptop I created a TI 2013 boot cd and used it to boot my desktop. On the desktop I perform a full recovery including the disk signature but still my system fails to boot. I get the message "Reboot and select proper boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key". I did check the BIOS and it is set to boot off the SSD.
Pat, I could not find a specific ATA-clean erase for the Corsair SSD and in their forum I see one of the moderator's post stating that it was necessary to perform a secure erase. I use TI 2013 and ran the erase. After the erase I see that it is one chunk of space (167GB) thus it looks like it is formatted but it is reported as unallocated.
I then booted with Acronis Disk Director but my version does not support dynamic drives and rather than booting and working with the SSD it just started to reboot. I stopped the reboot and went back to TI 2013.
I look and found my official copy of DD 11 so I installed it on my laptop and created a new bootable CD. This time it booted and I confirmed that the SSD was unallocated. I'm assuming that the Acronis erase did the proper job.
With my DD 11 disk I rebooted and selected TI (2013) and started the recovery process. I selected to recover NTFS (boot), MBR, NTFS (System Reserve) and recover disk signature.
I then checked the boot order in the BIOS and noticed that it was not correct. I had to make changes on two different screens in the boot section.
Now the system is booting. At this time I'm not sure if I had to actually restore. I had looked at the boot order in the BIOS but with my first attempt I did not dig deep enough.
Hi jgt1942,
Long time no posts from you --which is a good thing I guess.
When restoring multiple partitions, selecting the disk option restore (plus recover disk signature) usually works best if restoring to the same disk or a new disk of the same size. If selecting by single partitions, sometimes user has to overrule the selection by the program in order to match prior settings.
Item 1, 2, 3 at this link illustrates this for 2012 & 2013.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/29618
Look here to secure erase an SSD: http://www.corsair.com/applicationnote/secure-erase
Using ATI to erase is not really good because it does a lot of writes to the SSD. The secure erase totally blanks the disk without writes. Not only it is easier on the disk, but it actually restores the performance of the disk to manufacturing levels. Also keep in mind it is good practice to leave about 10-15% of your SSD unallocated. Modern SSDs already feature unallocated memory you cannot see, but if you have enough space, spare some for the SSD internal operations.
It looks like your problem was simply a BIOS boot set up issue...
Thanks guys - I think I left my brain out and have been fighting a few other health issues.
I suspect the issue was the BIOS, when I first checked I only checked one setting but as it turned out there were two settings. The system had been working without issue for almost a year. I was running some process (brain dead, I forget what it was) but I noticed that the PC was frozen, I let it set another 30 minutes and confirmed nothing was happening. I had to force the power off and when it booted I encountered the issue.
I did use ATI to erase the drive and restore, at least that worked :) and now I don't have to test that function. I'm still kicking myself for not really understanding the darn message.
GroverH - I've sorta been busy and my don't care trip level has been rather low. Plus lately I've been testing more with Win8. I had to do a few tweaks which took me a long time to learn and I'm still researching a few others. I hate the metro look but once I got it looking like Win7 I've been very pleased with Win8. I have it installed on my main laptop (Lenovo W700, x64 version)) which is almost five years old and the Win7 build (less than a year old) was super slow. At the same time I installed a SSD boot drive. This laptop has two HD bays plus a CD bay. In the second bay I installed a 500 GB drive for my data and misc stuff. I also installed on a old Compaq C304NR (x32 version), this system has only one HD but my data for this system is on the RAID 5 drives on my desktop that went south on me.
The old Compaq is now actually usable and I think I've pushed off replacing the Lenovo W700 at least 1-2 years because of the performance improvement with Win8 vs Win7. I do want to build another desktop with Win8 mainly to use the HD pool (storage spaces) that is in Win8. Currently I have about 15 TB (6 2 GB drives in a RAID 5 and two 3TB RAID 1 arrays) in my current desktop. Currently I don't need the space but I have a bunch of 1 TB, 2 TB and 3 TB drives (plus some smaller drives) just setting on the shelf.
As I install Win8 I've been attempting to update my install documents but this has been going slow and the don't care trip switch has been a factor.
Thanks again guys for your help!