Restoring Windows system drive
Has anyone successfully been able to restore the Windows system drive from a TIB file? The problem I am having is that once I start the restore and the computer is rebooted to the restore environment, it reports it cannot find the TIB file. The usb drive with the tib file is connected and the backup seems ok (I set the option to verify backup before restore as well as tried to restore some files). The suspicious issue is that in Windows the USB drive get the letter F. And the message in the Acronis restore environment says the file at f:\backup.tib cannot be found.
I really hope that is just some forgotten dialogue and I am just missing something simple because if TrueImage is working with drive letters assigned by Windows and uses the same letters in their own restore environment, that sounds very much like a huge bug to me.
Few notes, I am not interested in restoring using some bootable flash drive. If Trueimage offers the restore option within its Windows version, it should simply work. If, however, Trueimage uses drive letters to determine the location of the backup it probably is using drive letters to determine the destination and then it should never ever be used for drive/partition restore as you could very well overwrite something completely different.
Thank you for the answer. I realise the issue if the drive fails. But there are multitude of other situations where you may want to restore the disk than just a disk failure. Problems after windows updates or installation of certain software, or malware infection... All of these are good reasons to restore from a good backup.
Since Acronis TrueImage does offer the option to restore disk from within the windows, such option should simply work. If it does not (for whatever reason other than the fact that the backup is corrupted or that the main drive failed) then this should classify as a bug.
As I mentioned, the fact itself that Acronis restore environment relies on mount points rather than some unique specification like device ids is a big issue a certainly a reason for concern.
If at least there was an option to manually select source and destination in the restore environment. But there is no such option. It simply does not work.
Also you say that the restore environment is Linux based. I have to ask, since when does linux assign letters to drives? There is no such thing as f:\backup.tib in linux environment there is simply no concept of drives and letters as in windows.
I am only able to offer advice / suggestions here in these forums - you would need to take up this issue about how ATI works in this regard with Acronis, but unfortunately they have dropped support for the 2017 and earlier products, therefore you would need to use their Pay Per Incident support unless you have a license for ATI 2018.
Actually I spent yesterday almost half an hour with an Acronis technician and he had little understanding how the restore actually works. I am evaluating the software and have trial license, in many regards, TrueImage looks very nice, but I wonder why I should buy software that images the disk when restoring from the image does not work and when the only usable part is data restoration. How is that better than any other program that just backs up data? Even the backups are many times larger for Acronis since it has to backup all system files which in the end are useless.
Anyway, I am still at loss how it is possible that it does not work and the company has no idea about the problem and I still hope that there is some settings that I have not properly done.
This process can and does work but as with any recovery scenario there are also a number of variable that can be involved.
How is your USB drive connected to the computer?
What type of USB drive is it, i.e. USB 2.0 (older) or USB 3.0 (newer).
What type of USB port is it connected to on the computer, USB 2.0 or 3.0?
Is any type of USB hub involved, and if so, is it powered independently or from the USB bus.
When you are booted from the temporary Linux recovery environment, do you see the Acronis application panels? If so, are you able to use any of the option buttons shown and can you see your USB drive listed by name/type/size etc?
It is USB 3.0 drive to USB 3.0 port. The only hub is the one on the motherboard and it is powered from USB.
When I boot into the Recovery Environmnet, I cannot see any panels, there is just a dialogue with the message that it cannot find the tib file on f:\backup.tib and buttons repeat and cancel. I can keep pressing repeat without any change or I can hit cancel and the system reboots back into windows. Note that there is another window with progress bar underneath the dialogue with repeat/cancel window. I tried pressing various keys to try to get a console but no luck there.
The only thing that now comes to my mind (of course still hoping that the text about f:\backup.tib in dialogue is just wrong since it is linux environment), what filesystems of the usb drive that holds the backup are supported?
Ok, thanks for the further information, there can be issues with support for USB 3.0 devices but let's put that to one side and answer your filesystem question first.
The USB drive should be formatted as either NTFS (using either MBR or GPT) or else as FAT32. It should not be using exFAT.
See the ATI 2018 User Guide for further information on supported file systems.
It is BIOS issue so your system is not booting. You can reinstall your window from a disc. It should be manufacture copy.