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HELP!! PC is bricked. "Waiting for removeable devices"

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Help!

I just bought Acronis true image this morning, and did a disk image to my USB drive, and now, when I boot my PC, I get a warning pop-up that says "one or more of your removeable disks may not have started..."

Clicking Yes, No, or Cancel, doesn't change anything. The PC just reboots to the same screen.

Unplugging the USB drive I saved my image to doesn't help.

I am completely dead in the water, just 2 hours after buying the software. Typing this from my phone.

Can I somehow bypass Acronis at bootup to get back to Win 10?

Help!!!

 

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Rick, welcome to this user forum, sorry to hear that it is under these circumstances.

The good news here is that you have 30 days of free support direct from Acronis from the date of your purchase of their product.

See article: 18623: How to get Technical Support: Tips, Tricks and Useful Information for details of how to contact Acronis Support.

It would be helpful if you can outline what steps you have actually taken that brought you to this state with your system.  The message given suggests that an Acronis action is incomplete and it is expecting to find removable media needing to complete the action that the system has restarted to complete.

One option that you may be able to try is to go into your BIOS settings (normally you can press one of the following keys when first booting - Del, F1, F2 or perhaps F11 or F12) and check what your default boot device is set to - you may need to reset this to point either to Windows Boot Manager or to your first disk device (SSD or HDD).

I agree with Steve, start your machine and enter the bios and set boot order to your Wikndows installation.  Win 10 UEFI boot would be a Windows boot manager in the boot order list. If you do not see that then select the disk that contains your Windows install.

Booting to the bios and Windows Boot Manager got me into Windows. I'm typing from there now. Kind of afraid to reboot. Let me unplug my USB backup HDD, try restartng my PC, and I'll tell you what happens.

- Rick

Rebooting came up fine.

Made a boot disk to a 2GB USB stick. Quick-formatted my USB hard drive in Windows, and now I'm trying another full disk clone.

I'll update when the disk clone is finished.

- Rick 

 

 

Your issue is a bit common, when you boot to a boot disk, end that session and then reboot, sometimes the bios does not reset the boot order correctly.  To avoid that issue once you end boot disk session, power down the computer and remove the boot disk prior to starting up again. 

The clean way to do this with the default boot media used by True Image is to press ctrl-alt-F2 simultaneously and you will be taken to the Linux shell where you can enter the command poweroff.  This will shutdown the PC.

Rick,

In the first post you talk about a disk image, but then you talk about a clone. Which operation are you doing? Do not clone your system disk to a USB disk. You can however create an image and store the image backup file on the USB disk. In Acronis parlance, the clone is very different from an image (disk and partition backup). Most importantly if you ever clone, do not reboot with both the original disk and the cloned disk attached at the same time.

I cloned the disk again, and the same thing happened. Stuck in a reboot loop, looking for removeable media to start. Booting to my PC BIOS, or Ctrl-Alt-F2 and "poweroff" at the Linux prompt gets out of it.

I will try once more, and remove the USB HDD before powering on again. Maybe there should be a step in the instructions to do so, if this really is a common problem.

So, even with this reboot loop, or when I remove the USB HDD before booting, is the Clone function actually complete? Do I have a complete clone on my removeable HDD, or is it looking for closure or verification to be sure it's done? I'd hate to find out in an emergency that a final step wasn't done.

Lastly, if I modify the boot order in my PC BIOS, will that fix the issue? Or did you mean the Linux Acronis boot order?

 - Rick

Are you cloning really? Why don't you just do a disk image? The computer wouldn't have to reboot then, and you wouldn't have to fix the boot record issue.

Had no idea you were cloning from within Windows,  big mistake!  You need to create bootable Recovery Media to perform a system disk clone.  Will see what you post next.

OK, maybe I'm confused by the Acronis vocabulary...

I need a complete copy of my PC laptop hard drive, on an external (USB) 1TB drive that I can move off-site. A "clone" of that drive, that I can easily restore in case of a ransom virus or catastrophic failure. Every review online said Acronis TrueImage 2016 is THE program for this, so based on the software name "TrueImage" I used the words "image" and "clone" interchangeably... They are not the same?

Before I run Acronis again, I think I need some vocabulary schooling!

Thanks in advance fr the help,

- Rick 

Image - A file which contains data copied from a data disk source in a proprietary  compressed format which when recovered produces an exact copy of the source.

Clone - A disk to disk transfer of data bit for bit the result of which is an exact duplicate.

I'm doing this on a cell phone so hopefully another MVP can post more details.

These should help explain and show the differences.  If/when cloning, always start from your bootable media.  Taking an image can be done online or offline.  Although you can "START" a clone in Windows, it's a bad idea.... WHY???? Because it reboots the computer, modifies the bootloader on your OS hard drive and attempts to load Acronis from your main hard drive.  If you bios is configured in a way that prevents this boot, then it may fail and Acronis won't restore the bootloader on its own.  You can avoid this simply by starting the clone with your offline bootable recovery media instsead. 

Personally, I prefer backup and restore over clone.  Backing up first gives you a backup that can be used in case anything happens and then after you restore, you still have that backup to rely on if you need it again.  Even the Acronis documentation recommends you take a backup before attempting a clone - just in case.

How to back up your files with Acronis True Image 2016 - YouTube

How to clone a disk with Acronis True Image 2016 - YouTube

And here are a bunch of other great videos - many from regular users...

https://forum.acronis.com/forum/117004

Rick Wilkinson wrote:

OK, maybe I'm confused by the Acronis vocabulary...

I need a complete copy of my PC laptop hard drive, on an external (USB) 1TB drive that I can move off-site. A "clone" of that drive, that I can easily restore in case of a ransom virus or catastrophic failure. Every review online said Acronis TrueImage 2016 is THE program for this, so based on the software name "TrueImage" I used the words "image" and "clone" interchangeably... They are not the same?

Before I run Acronis again, I think I need some vocabulary schooling!

Thanks in advance fr the help,

- Rick 

 

For that use case, do a disk and partition backup (same as image). This will create a TIB file on the backup destination. You will be able to create different versions easily and keep them as long as you have enough space on the destination disk. Also, imaging can be done within Windows without any reboot or issues. You can even use the computer during the imaging process.

When you need to restore your computer, you will have to boot on the Acronis rescue medium. Make sure you create one after your backup, and that you try to boot your computer on it. Try to restore a couple of files.