Cannot boot with Acronis bootable rescue USB ?
Regarding the rescue media I'm using, I've made both a optical media and a usb stick with the rescue media builder, and they are having the same issues. Now, I've tried them on a secondary labtop I've got here, and Acronis works fine there. I can therefore confirm that my rescue media are working so the error is not the cd-rom or the usb stick.
I've been looking for something like a secured boot option inside my uefi/bios on my troubled workstation but without success so far. I'll continue to further investigate with the settings.
Ultimately, the issue in this instance is why you can't boot the USB in legacy mode at all and still seems related to a bios setting.
If you're up for it, i would reset the bios to "default", save, reboot and go back into the bios. I suggest this because I have had issues with other motherboards, where specific settings were not taking effect until i reset to default and this even happened on my current gibabyte board after i upgraded the bios firmware.
Then systematically change settings one-by-one and save//reboot with each change and try your boot override menu each time to find the option that allows legacy usb boot of your flash drive.
After resetting bios default:
1) Turn off secure boot, save, reboot.... at bios splash screen push the key for one time boot (F8 or F12 - not sure on this mobo so i'm guessing here). Does it show the UsB drive options for UEFI and Legacy? If so, try legacy. What happens?
2) If not, go back into the bios and make sure secure boot is still off. Then look for other settings specifically to enable CSM/Legacy/MBR mode. In some mobo's this may require an additional change. From Mustang's earlier post, find the option for Secure Boot and change from Windows 10 to "other OS", then save, reboot and try again, using the one-time boot menu to look for the flash drive options again.attempt. Is legacy USB shown? If so, what happens when you attempt to boot the USB flash drive in legacy mode again.
3) Do you have another system to test your media on that is also legacy capable? Can that system boot in legacy mode? Just want to try and confirm that you do have a good build of the media as well. If another system can boot the legacy mode, then we know it's not the media, but something still unique to the bios setup of this particular machine.
OK.
The description of what is happening when I try to boot in legacy mode is exactly the same as user "Frequent"gave.
As per 3) that has been already checked on the PC in my office. That system boots legacy mode (Asus P5E motherboard). It is a long thread to follow now, but I have already posted that the same media regularly boots in legacy mode on my laptops (Dell E6530, Dell E7440).
Although I think that it would be a shot in wrong direction (it looks to me like the app is not displaying on the screen). Nevermind, I'll try what you advised and report later. But isn't there some software tracing application (that Acronis engineers can use) to reveal what's going on under the blank screen when the monitor is not disconnected ? I mean there must be a way to detect whether the Linux app is actually running ? What is the system report option on the menus screen used for ?
In the mean time can you give me the advice if the recovery operation is safe from Windows ?. I had already done that, when I did a full recovery of the entire PC. However, in the post # 20 you worote:
" I never start a recovery in Windows - it can cause issues with your Windows bootloader since it essentially modifies it, replaces the primary boot witih Acronis and then goes from there. Nice in theory, BUT, if it fails to boot into Acronis, then it won't automatically restore the bootloader option back to Windows and you can end up with a non-bootable system. "
What I did then was to initiate a recovery operation in Windows. After a reboot, the system did not enter the Acronis Linux interface (or any kind of interface). There was a blank screen no progress bar or anything. According to the disk activity LEDs I found out that the restore operation is actually running and after some time the system rebooted to Windows normally. Is there supposed to some indication on the screen after the restart ?
Yes, when you initiate a disk restore in Windows, it is supposed to shutdown the OS, change the bootloader and launch Acronis in memory. You should almost immediately see the Acronis menu to pick Acronis 2016 or system report after the reboot. As you just found though, this did not work on your system and you just got a black screen because Acronis was not able to load ... most likely a result of your bios settings which prevented it. Luckily, it did not permanetly modify your Windows bootloader though and took you back into Windows. This is why I don't recommend starting a full disk recovery in Windows for anyone - too many varitaions of bios firmware and if not set correctly, is more likely to cause problems.
I don't use this method and haven't in a couple of years so can't say personally what it should like like - perhaps someone else can chime in though. It's not worth the risk for me so I don't allow Acronis, or any other application to make changes to the windows bootloader (as other backup software and certain applications will offer this as a feature or with an option to "integrate into windows". I would rather have a healthy, fucntional OS and insert my boot media when needed, than take this risk for the slight additional convenience that this functionality may provide. For those that do use this option and it's working - truly am glad, but because fo the potential risk, I can't recommend it.
For reference and my own knowledge. I backed up a Windows Virutal machine to my NAS storage using the "disks and paritions" method and selecting the entire virtual disk and all paritions as the source. I verified the VM had been installed in Legacy/Bios mode using msinfo32.exe. I then initiated the full disk restore of that image from within Windows. The process went off without a hitch and the restore was successful. Keep in mind that this VM is strictly legacy and would be the equivalent of a legacy only bios (what most people are familiary with). In this setup, it did exactly what it is/was supposed to and did it well.
1). After selecting the full disk image and the same drive as the destination. I immediately recieved a prompt that the system must be rebooted to continue. Options are to "restart" or "cancel". I pressed "restart" and it began to restart. There is no way to stop this process at this point (that I'm aware of).
2) System started to shutdown. Took nearly 3 minutes. I"m assuming it is modifying the Windows bootloader and copying the Acronis bootable files as needed at this time.
3) System finally rebooted. Black window with "Starting Acronis Loader..." displays for roughly 2-3 seconds. Black window remains with a flashing cursor and a single white line of text (Loading, please wait...) After about 2 seconds, below that shows "no raid disks" below that immediately shows "Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while..."
In a VM this all took just seconds since it is all loaded into memory, only one disk and it is hosted off a fast SATA3 SSD.
Changes to Blue background and a single white window "Operation Progress / Data recovery with the path to the backup file and the progress bar. Progress bar took about 2 minutes to move - then showed about 8 minutes to restore. Upon restore, system rebooted and went straight to the OS login screen. Restore was successful.
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I may configure a UEFI/GPT VM later and attempt to restore the same legacy image to see if it is indeed converted from legacy/MBR to a GPT/UEFI install successfully or not.
3) System finally rebooted. Black window with "Starting Acronis Loader..." displays for roughly 2-3 seconds. Black window remains with a flashing cursor and a single white line of text (Loading, please wait...) After about 2 seconds, below that shows "no raid disks" below that immediately shows "Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while..."
Changes to Blue background and a single white window "Operation Progress / Data recovery with the path to the backup file and the progress bar. Progress bar took about 2 minutes to move - then showed about 8 minutes to restore. Upon restore, system rebooted and went straight to the OS login screen. Restore was successful.
Thank you so much. Now it is pretty clear what was the cause of the problem reported by me and Frequent. After the system rebooted I did not see "Blue background and a single white window "Operation Progress / Data recovery with the path to the backup file and the progress bar". Only the black screen. However the app was actually running just not displaying on the screen. I realized it watching the HDD LEDs (a restore from an external HDD enclosure to a boot SSD drive). When it finished the system rebooted and went straight to the OS login screen. Restore was successful. Therefore I think that I was in fact able to boot the rescue USB in legacy mode only I could not see the application interface.
One setting in BIOS might be responsible for not displaying on the screen. In systems with both the iGPU and a dedicated PCIe graphics card there is a setting in BIOS called iGPU Multi-Monitor. I have Intel i3770K with the integrated HD Graphics 4000. I have the iGPU Multi-Monitor set to: "Enabled" and the Primary Display set to: "Auto" ( See the attachment ). The options for the Primary Display are: Auto, iGPU, PCIe. It might be that Acronis driver defaults to iGPU for the display and does not display on the proper screen which is connected to PCIe graphics. If Primary Display is set to "Auto" it automatically disables the onboard graphics when a PCIe card is added. I will try to disable the iGPU Multi-Monitor and alter the Primary Display settings. The default BIOS setting for iGPU Multi-Monitor is "Disabled". That's why the default BIOS settings might work.
It turns out here that the Igpu caused the problem. As suggested by user "Borko" I went into the bios and disabled the iGPU multi monitor, disabled the Render standby and selected PCI as primary display. Acronis rescue media now enters the menu and I can now start to take backup.
Thank you all so much for suggestions and help.
It turns out here that the Igpu caused the problem. As suggested by user "Borko" I went into the bios and disabled the iGPU multi monitor, disabled the Render standby and selected PCI as primary display. Acronis rescue media now enters the menu and I can now start to take backup.
Thank you all so much for suggestions and help.
It is enough to disable the iGPU Multi-Monitor only. No need to alter the Primary Display and Render Standby.
Now I can finaly boot using the legacy menu option: "Verbatim Store N Go". To make a first test I started the backup of the boot SSD drive (Samsung 840 Pro) to a HDD in an external USB 3.0 enclosure. However, I noticed it was much slower compared to the same operation in Windows. Therefore I stopped the backup and in the log file I saw the following messages: "Index corrupted" and "Forced Sector-by Sector mode" (see attachment). That was not the case when I've been using the ATI 2014 ????. By the way, where I can see the log file after the backup operation in Windows 10 ? It used to be there in earlier versions ?
Mystery solved - glad to hear it! Just goes to show that bios configs can be more tricky between different motherboard types. I'm surprised more Asus users haven't reported similar behavior before, but glad to have a reference now. Thanks!
Mystery solved - glad to hear it! Just goes to show that bios configs can be more tricky between different motherboard types. I'm surprised more Asus users haven't reported similar behavior before, but glad to have a reference now. Thanks!
If you didn't make a trial backup/restore from Windows we would have never known what was happening.
Do you have any idea why I get the error messages: "Index corrupted" and "Forced Sector-by Sector mode" in the log file when I make the backup using the Linux media (see the attachment in post #58). No such errors in Windows ?. BTW, I found the standalone app for the Acronis log files in Windows.
It usually means that the disk has a bad sector. Windows may be ignoring the sector as part of the default exclusions, but the media is backing up everything. You may want to run chkdsk /f /r in Windows on the drive. I'd also consider using the free version of Hard Disk Sentinel to see if it shows any bad sectors as well.
It usually means that the disk has a bad sector. Windows may be ignoring the sector as part of the default exclusions, but the media is backing up everything. You may want to run chkdsk /f /r in Windows on the drive. I'd also consider using the free version of Hard Disk Sentinel to see if it shows any bad sectors as well.
It's an SSD as a backup source ??? The destination drive is the WD1003 FZEX HDD (in an external enclosure). SSD drives don't get bad sectors either, they have no physical sectors. In addition this message (warning) was issued at the very beggining before the actual copying started (see the time labels in the attached picture of the post #58).
Does it make sense to use chkdsk with an SSD ?
SSD's can get corrupted too. Tools like hard disk sentinel will show SMART status as well which may show issues (perhasps not).
Chkdsk will still look for things like bad/corrupted startup files and attempt to repair those. See this thread; upon recieiving this error (also with a SSD) the user was able to restore after first running chkdsk and then runninig Windows system repair.
Sectors are part of the file system in a logical sense. A better terminology when discussing SSD is block rather than sector.
Most SSD's will contain some bad sectors/blocks from the factory. These bad blocks are marked as such so that the drive controller will not use the block. Over time additional bad blocks may occur due to weak or leaky flash MLC cells. This is expected to occur over the life of the drive. When an OS reports bad sectors that information comes from the drive controller as it must inform the OS of this condition so that the file system knows of that condition.
Since chkdsk is a file system check it will not harm your SSD nor will your SSD suffer ecessive write counts in running the utility. I will say that the /r switch which corrects bad sectors on a mechanical drive is ineffective on an SSD as such function is performed by the drive controller on those drives. chkdsk /f however is effective on an SSD since it fixes file system errors. Your reported error indicates that such an error exists on your drive.
if you want to run other checks on the drive for errors you do have options. Windows itself includes a utility for this known as fsutil. You can check your SSD's file system by running fsutil dirty query c: from an admin command prompt. Additionally, the suggested HD Sentinel utility is a great tool for monitoring and discovering drive and file system health. I highly recommend that you download and run it periodically on your system. It can forewarn of emminate drive failure and is well worth the effort to help avoid major drive related problems.
Thanks to you both. You were right. Chkdsk/f fixed some orphan files and the backup procedure now works in full speed (without errors and much faster i.e. not sector-by-sector) in the Linux media. Now I wonder why wasn't that indicated in Windows ?
However, Hard Disk Sentinel did not detect anything as well as Crystal Disk Info ?
On HD Sentinel - there is a 3rd tab for S.M.A.R.T. It may show issues, but then again, may not. SMART is really the life of the hard drive based upon reads/writes overtime, but sometimes it will give you more info about the drive.
Can't really say why no errors reported in Windows - there is an option under the advanced tab for each backup task under the heading of "Error Handling". Here, you can silence warnings and also ignore bad sectors - perhaps that is turned on? If not, I'd say that VSS somehow was able to somehow still back it up, where as the offline backup is not using VSS, but the Acronis Snapapi backup method instead so there is a little bit of difference.
Main thing, is we learned that Chdsk /F is still valuable for even SSD's and that bad blocks (or sectors) can be the root cause of failed backups so it's worth checking into when these types of issues occur.
Did you run the fsutil command? I think if you had it would have reported the drive as Dirty meaning that the file system had issues. These types of errors can often be fixed by chkdsk /f if the errors are minor in nature. In any case glad that you have now resolved the issue.
Thanks for reporting back.
In my case I can boot from a rescue CD using Acronis' #6569. The new build #6571 doesn't work. I am getting the same symptoms as Borko. I am using the same computer, Dell XPS 8900, Windows 10. Same computer, same software, same monitor settings. The only way to reboot is to unplug the computer and start all over, but the problem persists. The problem started when I recently upgraded to the latest version of Acronis and the new Acronis rescue CD. I should have left it alone, as everything was working fine.
Kenneth,
Borko's issue was not the media, but in fact, a change in his bios firmware which reset the display settings and resulted in the output not showing on the display once booted into the media. I suspect you have a build issue with your newly created media - are you using a disc (cd/dvd instead of a thumb drive). v6571 and 6569 are essentially the exact same product, other than one small change made in the application, but should have no bearing on the bootable media.
There seems to be more going on here. What do you mean you can't reboot - in Windows you can never reboot... or, once the recovery media has started and nothing happens then you have to reboot because it's trying to do somethign, but nothing really? How are you booting the recue media - UEFI mode or Legacy mode - you should specifically pick the correct one with your Dell one time boot menu. Try one then the other. Please see this post for screenshots of a non XPS but new Dell 5510 Precision bios settings, one time boot menu options, etc. I can use v6571 on any Dell (although I have not tried any XPS as we only purchase the business line, but the XPS and the precisions are practically identical with the internal guts).
I am always using a CD to boot to Acronis. The CD 6569 version works the CD 6571 doesn't. By not booting I mean it won't reboot if the CD 6571 is in the computer. The screen freezes and I have to restart the computer by unplugging it to get it to boot into anything. My computer does boot into windows normally. I am using the same BIOS settings on both CD's. Right from the beginning I had trouble with the new version of Acronis and Dell. In my Dell XPS 8300 if I inserted the CD into my computer it would detect it and boot into Acronis. In my XPS 8900 I have to get into the BIOS by pushing F2 everytime I want to use Acronis. Previously I had the BIOS sequence set so that IF a CD was inserted it would boot first from the CD then to the HD. If no CD was present the computer would boot into Windows using the HD in the computer. For some reason the new Dell BIOS runs differently. I am booting UEFI mode for both CD's. Using the CD 6571 CD a display comes up saying push one for Acronis, 2 for something else, 3 to boot normally. I push one, it detects Acronis and says it is loading it. Finally a screen comes up that says Acronis True Image with a blue background, but the screen that displays push this to backup or restore never appears. After a full five minutes nothing appears. I get the impression some of the problem is with Dell. It takes substantially longer to boot into Acronis (by using CD 6569) that in my XPS 8300.
Kenneth,
I believe you are correct with this being a Dell issue. On some of the newer ultrabooks, I cannot get them to boot third party discs in legacy mode either, even if I specifically change the bios bootloader from UEFI to Legacy mode and manually select a legacy USB flash drive with the one time boot menu.
In your case, I also believe that you are attempting to boot your disc in legacy mode (blue background), when instead, your XPS 8900 is most likely a UEFI OS install and, as a result, the Acronis bootable media needs to be booted in UEFI mode (especially if you have secure boot enabled or don't have legacy roms enabled). I'm not familiar with XPS sytems, but in all of the other Dells I have used, pushing F12 after a restart/reboot gets to the one time boot menu and then I can manually select either UEFI or legacy boot options for CD or USB. I would first try this with your disk (see this post with screenshot references that I just posted from a new Precision 5510 as it may help with navigating the XPS bios and one time boot as well). If that still doesn't help, I would try a USB media instead of a CD/DVD disk. Any USB flash drive (32gb or less - you only need 2GB really) should do the trick. You may find that using the USB flash drive is not only more convenient, but also faster, especially if you have a USB 3.0 flash drive and USB 3.0 ports on your system. If you're in need of a good/fast/cheap USB flash drive, the Sandisk ultra flair 16gb is about $8 and the Sandisk ultra fit is about the same price. I like the flair better than the fit, because the flair is a single, sturdy metal drive that is sleek and small, but not as small as the fit which is more likely to be lost because of its small size. Plus, you can't really label the fit, but the flair has just enough room for this.
One last note.. what is the SATA mode of the 8900 set to - RAID or AHCI. Dell seems to be shipping many newer systems with "Raid-on" even with a single drive, and we always switch them to AHCI which seems to work much more efficiently with Acronis bootable media and other third party boot managers that need to be able to detect the hard drive. If running Windows 10, you can just switch this mode in the bios (assuming you don't actually have any multiple disks in RAID). But if you are running Windows 8.1, 8, or 7, you would first need to apply the Microsoft fixit in Windows, then power down, switch from RAID to AHCI and should have no trouble booting up after that.
Did you run the fsutil command? I think if you had it would have reported the drive as Dirty meaning that the file system had issues. These types of errors can often be fixed by chkdsk /f if the errors are minor in nature. In any case glad that you have now resolved the issue.
Thanks for reporting back.
Yes, I did. Somehow it reported drive as "non dirty"??
Anyway, I issued a "chkdsk/f" and it fixed the problem. It started repairing after restart and when it finished it restarted automatically once again and finally booted to Windows. It is a bit tricky to find a chkdsk report in Windows 10.
BTW, I thought of NTFS as being more robust and reliable. To be honest I made this problem myself by turning off the power in Windows.
Dell has nothing to do with it. If it was a Dell problem why does it work with one CD but not the other? Their are only two things I have changed since having this problem: 1) installed latest version of Acronis and 2) Installed latest version of Acronis bootable media to CD. It is a software problem with Acronis. I am booting in UEFI mode. The blue screen I see is not the blue screen of death. It is the normal screen that I see before Acronis boots into it's interface. The display reads "Acronis True Image" with a blue clock in the middle of the screen with a white dial spinning around in it. This is not the cursor spinning around. It never stops spinning, and consequently never launches the interface. I am using Windows 10 64 bit and am not running RAID, I am running ACHI. I just burned another CD thinking it might be a defective CD, but the new CD doesn't work either. Why the old version bootable media works and the new one doesn't would be interesting to know. As the next step, I will have to try booting to a USB flash. I would dread having to buy a new USB everytime Acronis updates it's media. I was satisfied with the old software and should have left it alone. I use my computer for simple home use and should not have this much trouble using a simple backup program. All I want to do is backup my entire computer once a month.
I finally got it to work. I was making the rescue CD direct from Acronis' website by getting into my account and downloading and saving the file and then burning it using Easy CD creator, which is a third party tool. I made the successful CD by getting into Windows, then the Acronis program, then tools, and created the CD direct from within Windows. Works fine now! I have a way of making things more complicated than they should be.
Kenneth,
You're not the first to have this issue using 3rd party tools. I often use Rufus or ISO2USB as well, but have had similar issues with flash drive booting afterwards. Since Acronis is capable of creating a direct USB flash drive or burn directly to a CD/DVD, I'd recommend to everyone to just use it. If one is using a UsB flash drive that was previously created with a 3rd party tool, doing a full format instead of a quick format is recommended to ensure there are no hidden paritioins on the flash drive that Windows is unable to see. Thanks for posting your results.
The next time I update the rescue CD I will try to remember to burn directly from Acronis. However, that is not the real problem. I had the external USB drive (Western Digital Passport HD) that I was backing up to in the computer while trying to launch the program. I removed the external drive while booting from the rescue CD's. All of them now work, including those burned directly from Easy CD creator! I put a note on the external HD so hopefully I will not have this problem again.
Ah - good catch. If you use your onetime boot menu/boot override menu, you should hopefully be able to pick a spefic boot item in the bios instead of the bios arbitraily picking whatever is listed first in the boot order, or if there are 2 similar devices (say a USB hard drive and a USB flash drive), prevent it from automatically picking the one you don't want.
Regardless, sounds like you found the culprit and have a solution now, so that's what counts.
Borko's issue was not the media, but in fact, a change in his bios firmware which reset the display settings and resulted in the output not showing on the display once booted into the media.
This is basically correct. However, it needs to be somewhat clarified. It was not actually a change in the latest firmware. The setting "iGPU Multi-Monitor" (Advanced - System Agent Configuration - Graphics Configuration) has always been there since the very first BIOS that my motherboard came with. The default setting was "Disabled". It was me who changed it to "Enabled". It must be enabled if one wants to utilize the iGPU using the Lucid Logix Virtu software, or even only to install the Intel drivers for the iGPU. That's what I did a long time ago and it was left enabled, although I was actually not using the iGPU. I didn't realize that I am wasting 1 GB of shared memory in vain.
In my case the problem emerged when I upgraded from ATI 2104 to ATI 2016. In ATI 2016 something was obviously changed in boot media. The ATI 2014, for example, booted the Linux media in legacy mode without problems in spite of the enabled "iGPU Multi-Monitor" in BIOS. However, with this setting enabled, ATI 2016 does not display the output on the screen although it infact booted into the media.
Someone should report this to Acronis engineers.
Borko,
I think you're mistaken about the need to enable iGPU Multi-Monitor in order to install drivers for the integrated graphics. I have used the Intel graphics on that motherboard and installed the drivers in Windows without ever enabling iGPU Multi-Monitor.
Borko,
I think you're mistaken about the need to enable iGPU Multi-Monitor in order to install drivers for the integrated graphics. I have used the Intel graphics on that motherboard and installed the drivers in Windows without ever enabling iGPU Multi-Monitor.
May be you are right, but in my case when I disable the iGPU Multi-Monitor the Intel HD Graphics disappears in Device Manager. In addition I found some info on the net stating that a message: "The computer does not meet the minimum specifications..." or similar appears when one starts the setup of Intel Graphics drivers ?
See this: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/317959-30-install-intel-graphic-asus
It would be interesting, as we have the same mobos, if you could temporary enable/disable the "iGPU Multi-Monitor" and see what happens when trying to boot the ATI 2016 Linux media in legacy mode ?
I can confirm that enabling iGPU Multi-Monitor prevents TI from displaying the GUI when booting the Linux recovery media. I only tried it Legacy mode as you requested. It boots normally until it get to the last stage when the GUI should display. All you see is a black screen as you described.
I can confirm that enabling iGPU Multi-Monitor prevents TI from displaying the GUI when booting the Linux recovery media. I only tried it Legacy mode as you requested. It boots normally until it get to the last stage when the GUI should display. All you see is a black screen as you described.
Yes it was exactly my problem. Don't you think it should be reported to Acronis ?
I would recommend it. Please submit feedback through the app with a reference to this thread and a system report. I will pass it along to technical support as well.