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Curious problem problem with TIH2011 boot-CD vs. lan-boot

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I have encountered a stange error when restoring a backup to a Lenovo x201 with Acronis products.

The Laptop has no optical drive so I booted acronis recovery media via (custom) PXE. After finishing the recovery procedure the laptop refused to boot the OS (win-xp), claiming that a hdd error had occured and telling me to press ctrl+alt+del. It would still allow me to boot to the recovery partition that was inculded in the tib file and all files in the OS partition were on the hdd. Since a customer created the tib-file with a different acronis product then the one we used to recover it, I thought that might be part of the problem. I tried various products ranging from TIH2009 to Backup&Recovery Server all without succes.

Finally I downloaded the TIH2011 trial Version and used the media-builder to create a boot-cd that I booted from a usb-cd-drive. It actually worked perfectly! The recoverd XP started without any problems.

I was all set to buy an upgrade to TIH2011, but wanted to try it one last time in the pxe-environment. I took the kernel and ramdisk files and included them in the pxelinux bootmenu. It booted, it recoverd the image correctly and then it presented me with the old error again.

I have no idea why it should make such a big difference between booting acronis from an USB-CD-Drive to booting it from the network. Are there some special non-obvious parameters that you have to give acronis to recover images correctly when booting the Kernel and Ramdisk files from a syslinux environment?

I used:

KERNEL acronis/kernel.dat
APPEND rw initrd=acronis/ramdisk.dat /S mbrcrcs=on vga=791 quiet

I am really puzzled by this strange and inconsitent behavior.

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I have looked into this some more and took some note while recovering with TIH2011 booted fom CD and from Lan. It appears that despite clicking exactly the same buttons in boths attempts the programm performs different tasks depending on where you boot it from.

The CD performed the tasks:

110 Recover volume
110 Recover volume
51 Recover volume structure

When booting exactly the same version of TIH2011 over lan it performed different tasks:

47 Delete drive
11 Recover volume
11 Recover volume
56 Recover MBR

The Image I have used has two volumes and the mbr in it. The first volume is a lenovo recovery partition and boots fine in both versions. The second volume is Win-XP and fails to boot after recovering while booting from lan. I have used Microsoft secinspect.exe to compare the two MBRs and discovered that in the 2nd version the start points for the xp volume were set wrong.

So I guess I have now a fairly good idea as to why it would not boot. I still don't understand why TIH would perform differnt tasks depending on where it is botted from.

Why did it decide to actions 110 and 51 in one situation and actions 47, 11 & 56 in another? Is there an actual reason for this a bug?

Is there something I can do to influence which tasks it will perform? Is there some menu where i can specify that I want acronis to act a certain way? Can I change the way it boots to trick it into doing things one way or another? Can I somehow create a script detailing exactly the tasks I want it to perform and not have it decide for itself?