TI Does Not Recognise Portable HDD
Hi,
I'm trying to create a bootable HDD using TI but it is not recognised at the drive selection stage.
It is Hitachi USB drive with three partitions:
1) 3GB FAT, Active Primary Partition
2) 3GB FAT, Primary Partition
3) 300GB NTFS, Primary Partition
Windows knows they're there and you can see them in Windows explorer, but the Bootable Rescue Media Builder does not see any of them.
Does anyone know why this is?
Thanks
Without the additional details, I would also have to guess that this is a limitiatio of Aconis offline bootable media default Linux OS not having the necessary drivers. If the external drive is not being found by default with the Linux bootable media, WinPE should provide better results. Please download the Windows 10 ADK and let Aconis make the default bootable offline recovery media as WinPE and see if the drives are then found.
http://forum.acronis.com/forum/111208#comment-332581
and/or
http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#3…
and/or
Cosmarchy,
Are you trying to clone your system disk? Will it allow you to select the USB drive as a backup source? We will need some more information to analyze your situation.
FtrPilot
What I was thinking is, supposing this is supported by the software, is to be able to boot any PC from the portable disk using the portable drive bootable media on partition 1 in order to be able to clone / create backup image for storage on partition 3. This way I can just plug in to any PC in order to back it up.
It does let me select this drive as a backup location.
Unfortunately, Windows won't boot from a USB hard disk, only USB flash drives. I don't know why.
FtrPilot
This is a limitation of Acronis and other similar applications. A lot of them will only create bootable media on disks marked as "removable". By default, hard drives, other than flash drvies, even when external enclosures are considered "fixed" disks and usually programed in the firmware as such.
If you want Acronis (or other tools) to be able to boot from an external hard drive you can do either of these:
1) Build an Acronis bootable USB flash drive. Take an image of it with Acronis and then push the image back to your USB "fixed" hard drive. Caution - this will wipe the contents of your hard drive though and most likely format your drive to FAT32 which is what Acronis needs! Once you have pushed the image to the hard drive, it will be bootable just like your flash drive.
Alternatively, and the method I would suggest if you are comfortable using partioning tools, would be to first use a third party tool like MiniPartitionHome Free or similar product (Acronis Disk Director should work nicely too, but from what I've read in the forum, it is not yet compatible with Windows 10?), and create a new partition at the beginning of your hard drive (if it has data on it already) - 1GB should be plenty (better to have a little extra than not enough though so I'd use 1GB). Then push your bootable Acronis Flash drive image that was created with aCronis to that partition and it will be bootable as well and only that partition will be made FAT32. Your other partition can remain NTFS and will still have your data on it if done correctly.
2) Build an Acronis bootable recovery .ISO. Then use a free tool like RUFUS (it is legit and virus free - it is a wonderful tool for making a hard drive or flash drive into a single application bootable tool) to push the ISO to your external hard drive and it will become bootable with Acronis. Caution - this will format your hard drive during the process!!! Once the drive has been made bootable, you can then add your extra files/data as desired.
Using the the recommended option above, I have actually created 2 partions on my 1TB USB 3.0 external hard drive - partition one is ATIH WinPE, partition 2 is ATIH Linux, and Partition 3 is my regular NTFS drive where I push images to. Now I have a single, large hard drive that can boot on just about any PC environment and push images to the same drive.
Alternatively, and the method I would suggest if you are comfortable using partioning tools, would be to first use a third party tool like MiniPartitionHome Free or similar product (Acronis Disk Director should work nicely too, but from what I've read in the forum, it is not yet compatible with Windows 10?), and create a new partition at the beginning of your hard drive (if it has data on it already) - 1GB should be plenty (better to have a little extra than not enough though so I'd use 1GB). Then push your bootable Acronis Flash drive image that was created with aCronis to that partition and it will be bootable as well and only that partition will be made FAT32. Your other partition can remain NTFS and will still have your data on it if done correctly.
This is exactly what I was aiming to achieve ;)
I have a portable HDD with three partitions already and I have created the bootable ISO but the problem is when I open Rufus, there are no devices available until I check "List USB Hard Drives" under advanced. After this is checked, the Devices dropdown then contains my portable HDD listed as "Multiple Partitions (E:) (F:) (G:) [320GB]" but how do I choose which partition I'd writing the ISO to?
Thanks
Rufus is pretty much going to wipe out your drive and format the whole thing so let's go the other route on this one.
In this case, you'd be better off, creating a USB flash drive first (any old thumb drive will work fine - 1GB is probably enough - 2GB for sure) instead of a bootable .ISO. Then take a full image the flash drive (don't do sector-by-sector though, but be sure to backup everything on it) with Acronis. Then use Acronis to push the image back to the partition on your portable hard drive and that should work just fine. In my case, I created 2 paritions on my portable HD... one for the default Linux bootable media, and one for the WinPE bootable media - just to have both capabilities in case the Linux version isn't working for a particular piece of hardware.