Cannot recover the selected disk. Unable to create partitions.

Mark, welcome to these public User Forums.

My first thought on seeing your screen image is that you need to try clicking on the Disks option for the Recovery panel then review the options shown there.

I suspect that your 'Entire PC'  backup may include a disk drive or partition which isn't available (at the time you saw the error!).

I personally never use the 'Entire PC' backup source option as I prefer to keep my backups to single disks only, so that when any recovery is needed, I just need to pick the correct backup file and not worry about it containing data from any other disks!  The chances of multiple disks all failing together are minimal, but a single disk failure is a lot more possible!

I would suggest that you run validation on the backup and see what that result is.  Could be a corrupt backup or corruption on disk that is cause of the issue.

Hello Steve,

Thank you for your suggestion of choosing the "Disks" option on the Recovery panel.  It seems as if all "disks" are available for recovery.  I have attached a screenshot (Recovery.jpg).

i am pondering your suggestion re: backing up only single disks, not the "entire PC".  I wonder if you're assuming that my PC has more than one physical HDD? As you can see by the attached screenshot (Recovery.jpg), my 4 disks are actually just partitions of a single SSD. Also, under the Partition option in the Recovery Panel (see Partition.jpg), I can select specific drives to recover.  Intuitively, it feels like everything is good (of course I've never had to perform a recovery!).

Does knowing that my SSD has multiple partitions help explain the original error message on the "entire pc" option of the Recovery Panel?

Do you still recommend that in my specific case (single SSD with multiple partitions), I back up each drive individually (as opposed to "Entire PC")?

Thanks for your support,

Mark

Mark, thanks for the update and further screen images.

As I have never used the 'Entire PC' option for my own PC's, I had not come across the Recovery panel ever showing an extra 'Entire PC' recovery option!

Given that your PC only has one disk with multiple partitions, then selecting the Disks option is the method to use.

This doesn't really explain why the error message was given when selecting the 'Entire PC' option on the Recovery panel, unless at the time this backup was created there was another disk present at that time that is not present now?

The way to check the above is to Open the Location where the backup .TIBX file is stored and to double-click on this in Explorer (clicking on the oldest file or the one showing a size of 12KB) to see how many drive letters that shows?

See the image above of one of my own backup file contents showing all the drive letters for that single source drive.

Hi Steve,

I opened up the backup file and it showed the four partitions of my single SSD (essentially the same screenshot as yours).  So it would seem that the backup has captured all the logical drives as requested.  You postulated that perhaps "...at the time this backup was created there was another disk present that is not present now?", but this appears not to be the case.

Enchantech suggested I validate the backups - I've got it set up to validate weekly.  The last validation failed (don't know why), but the previous validation was successful.

So.  

The backed up data appears to be there - just doesn't seem I can Recover the "Entire PC".  Not sure where to go from here?

Thanks

Mark,

Can you open this backup in Explorer by double clicking on it then once opened double click on each partition to open those.  Do they all open?  Can you navigate to your documents folder, open that folder, and copy out a file from that folder to another location preferably to your desktop or some other location?  Can you try this with each partition that is lettered and report your results?

Hello Enchantech,

I did as you suggested.  Results:

• C:drive - no problem opening and copying a file from the backup to the desktop
• D:drive - no problem opening and copying a file from the backup to the desktop
• Q:drive - this is the Lenovo Recovery partition; it is 34GB in size of which 22GB are free; when I click to open it in the backup, it says "This folder is empty" (same message if I attempt to open it on the SSD)
• The fourth partition is "disk 0" (?) when I click to open it in the backup, it says "This folder is empty" See attached photo SSD Map

Appreciate your interest & help,

Mark

Mark,

Your results are what I was expecting and not unusual at all.  This suggest that the disk should be fully recoverable of course only actually recovering the backup to a disk will prove it for certain.

What I think you see here is what is probably deemed as expected behavior as strange as that sounds.  You have a single disk with two lettered partitions and two unlettered partitions.  Many users setup their PC's in this manner.  Many ATI users use the default Entire PC option when backing up their PC as well.  So why would the issue you bring here be expected?

I suggest that the reason is the Entire PC backup option is meant to be used on a standard single disk, single lettered partition in which case the message you bring to light here would not appear.  But add a second lettered partition and use the Entire PC option and the app interprets that as a two disk backup.  The app also knows that there are not two disks to restore to so, the message appears.  Why have others not brought this here before now?  I would say because no one until now ever looked.

I would also say that this backup has a very good chance of being recovered successfully if you choose the Disk option in recovery rather than the Entire PC option.  Having said that, I do not at all recommend that you perform or even attempt to perform a recovery of this backup using the Windows installed TI application.  Acronis recommends that recovery of a Windows OS disk be performed using the bootable Recovery Media.  I carry that even further and say that you MUST use the boot media to recover a Windows OS disk.  Not doing so can end up with a corrupted backup image, source disk, and target disk resulting in a completely non working system.

The safest way to recover this backup you have is to do so using Recovery Media.  I will go even further in saying that using Recovery Media you will not see the message that you see in the Windows installed application either.

Be advised that I suspect your PC is a laptop in which case it is necessary that if you attempt a recovery of the backup image you have, you MUST first remove the existing hard drive from your laptop and replace it with the disk you are recovering to.  At that point you can then recover the backup to that disk and have better than average chance of success.