Attempting backup or recover with USB hard disk - credentials prompt

Most likely boot cd doesn't support exFAT filesystem (it's not mentioned in the userguide) If you used it to backup a live windows system, it used windows drivers to access the disk and it worked.

Thanks for the response. The only choices I have to format the USB disk in Windows 7 or Windows XP are NTFS and exFAT. If I format it as NTFS it is not recognized at all. If I format it as exFAT, then I get the credentials prompt. So I don't think it is lack of support for exFAT because it would act the same as NTFS (not recognized).

So, this is a 250GB USB disk. How should I format it, and what OS do I need to do that if I can't use Windows? It has to work with a Windows machine. This seems like a pretty ridiculous problem to me. I made the boot CD from an Acronis installation on a Windows 7 machine.

Do I have to make a small partition on the disk and then format that partition to something Acronis likes? Again, that is ridiculous if true.

It should recognize NTFS file system ( you can format the USB stick to NTFS to check it), as a source and as a destination. As it doesn't, the problem may be with either booting from USB CD (if bios does something with USB controller to boot from it) or power that USB ports can provide to the disk or something unusual with the disk itself that prevents its proper detection in bootable media.

May be
sysinfo.txt - Information about your hard disks and their structure as detected in Acronis Linux. See Acronis Linux Report;
disks.txt - Information about your hard disks and their structure as detected in Windows. See Acronis Report;
as in this article
http://kb.acronis.com/content/14486 will help.

Ok, I will have a look at those files when I get a chance to try this again. I am glad to hear NTFS should work. It does bother me that formatting the disk differently yields different bad results for me -- I really have no idea where that prompt for credentials is coming from if it is formatted exFat. However if I can get it to work with NTFS then that is my preference anyway.

Can't believe BIOS is involved at all, but I won't rule anything out at this point. Thank you for the information, and I will post back here with the results of the Acronis Report.

Interesting. I booted the Acronis CD from my Windows 7 machine with the intent of running the reports (I can't get to them as that Knowledge Base article instructs however - there is no option to 'Run Management Console' as the article describes) and I can see the USB disk just fine on this machine. I did format the disk as NTFS before I tried this.

So it appears your suggestion that it is BIOS-related has merit. The machine it failed on was fairly old now that I think about it, but I don't know a lot about the machine because it came from a vendor. I would have to assume the disk size may be a problem - is there any generic BIOS settings that I might look for to see if support for larger disks is possible on that machine? It's been so long since I've had to look for options like that in a BIOS.

In any event, thanks for the heads-up, at least I know the issue is confined to that old machine I was trying to back up.

I can't get to them as that Knowledge Base article instructs however - there is no option to 'Run Management Console' as the article describes)

The article assumes it's an 'Advanced' version that lets you set up network and/or connect to the agent remotely. For standalone version just skip this step, it runs console automatically.
There are some reports that the limit may be 128 GB, (and even on not very old MB) however in that thread refers to booting from it
http://reboot.pro/11684/