Recovery problems
Although I have created a start up disc, it is ignored when I start my PC.
If I use Recovery from the desk top, it appears to start OK and is calculating the restoration time when I am told to restart the computer or it will switch off. However, if I restart it just returns to the beginning of the recovery process again.
Thanks. But are you saying I need to buy s/w to make my True Image 13 work? Or can I do that within my Win8 PC?
No, you don't need any more software. You need to enter BIOS or UEFI to assign a higher boot priority to CD/DVD drive than internal HD.
John,
You stated: "Although I have created a start up disc, it is ignored when I start my PC."
Your system (computer) has the ability to boot to various devices. To control which device is the primary boot device, you must change the settings in your system BIOS / UEFI firmware to have the system boot from the CD/DVD first, before attempting to boot to the hard disk. Many systems have an "F" key option at boot time (F10 or F12 on many systems), to allow selection of a temporary boot device (i.e.: CD/DVD). Some systems do not. You need to consult the documentation on how to change the boot order on your system to allow booting to the CD/DVD first.
There is nothing else you need to purchase to allow booting to the CD/DVD.
The "Startup Disk" you created should be the one from within Acronis True image. It is called the Acronis Rescue Media. Any time you wish to do recovery of a live system drive, you are better off doing it from the Recue Media, as this gets Windows out of the way of the procedure.
James
James,
Okay. But surely, regardless of BIO settings, when I loaded ATI13 on my Win8 Desktop I should have been able to restore an external backup (created by ATI13 & Win8) without being instructed to 'restart', as this led me into a futile cycle. Or am I wrong?!
I am scared of touching BIO. Are thetre any instructions you know of that are relevant?
John
JOhn,
When you restore a disk that contains an active partition, ATI will always reboot into a pre-Windows environment. If that reboot didn't work (ie, Windows started again), then you may have hardware support issues in your Acronis pre-WIndows environement which is based on Linux.
The same environment is used when you produce the recovery CD.
For these reasons, it is highly recommended to restore or clone partitions from the recovery CD. Doing backups from Windows is no issue.
Reboot your computer and observe messages before Windows starts loading, you should see something like "press F2 to enter setup".
So reboot and press the appropriate key until you enter the BIOS/UEFI setup.
Look for the boot section. There will be settings showing which disk will be booted first. Make sure your DVD player is the one on the top of the list.
If you have UEFI, you should have the choice to activate legacy boot options. You might have to disable "secure boot" to activate "legacy boot".
Once you have booted successfully on your recovery CD and restore the disk, change the settings back to where they were.